A few stages in the long march towards equality
Pushing her elder sister's arguments to their logical conclusion, Angelina Grimké would explicitly call for political rights for women: nowhere in the Holy Scripture is it said that women cannot govern a country, be it Great Britain (where Queen Victoria had just begun her reign at the time of her writing) or the United States of America (where the selection of a woman as her party's candidates and her subsequent approbation by the popular vote would have to wait for the 21st century). However neither Angelina nor her sister Sarah were to lead the struggle for women's political rights.
Neither sister was present in 1848 when Seneca Falls, a neighbourhood in the State of New York witnessed the gathering of some 300 people in a Convention where the major Reformed Churches were represented (quakers[1] , Methodists[2] , Presbyterians, Episcopalians). It would issue – in spite of strong internal dissent – the document calling for women's right to vote known as the Declaration of Sentiments (meaning here opinion held). The leaders of this convention, e.g. Lucretia Mott [3] and especially Elisabeth Cady Stanton[4], take their leaf directly from the argumentation that underpinned Sarah Grimké's some ten years earlier. (Thought)provokingly modeled on the 1776 Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of Sentiments asserts that a woman has just as much right to demand her independence and her equality before men as the 1776 colonist claiming his in the face of British power. In the United States, suffrage would eventually be granted women in 1920 under Woodrow Wilson (19th amendment of the Constitution), that is more than 70 years after the Seneca Falls Convention, at the term of a harsh battle through the Houses of government. A few governments had preceded the United States on this path (New-Zealand, Australia, Norway, Finland) to be followed by the rest throughout the 20th century. It is not forbidden to think that the decision of a major power to grant women the vote played a key role in the effective rolling out of “universal” suffrage spreading outwards in all of the world's democracies. Added to the action of other feminist actors, Sarah Grimké's struggle – though not focused on the suffrage issue as such – will not have been in vain, even if the results were long in coming.
