I just need to state an opinion/response to the statement below: 160-220 words

Dear Dr. Beachly,

     Sarah M. Grimke’s’ written document on, “Condition of Women in the United States,” is spoken on how a woman’s value was only significant if she was married; and even then she was only recognized of little value.  Women were made to feel inferior to that of men and to have no sense of worth.  For instance, Sarah M. Grimke says; “They are taught to regard marriage as the one thing needful, the only avenue to distinction.  Women seldom think that men will be allured by intellectual acquirements, because they find, that where any mental superiority exists, a woman is generally shunned and regarded as stepping out of her “appropriate sphere”. (p.2)

     I found that Sarah M. Grimke voiced powerfully, her empathy toward woman of slavery. The way women of color were degraded, raped, beaten, with no remorse or sense of value. Her empathy is shared here when she says; “There is another class of women in this country, to whom I cannot refer, without feelings of the deepest shame and sorrow. I allude to our female slaves”. (p.7) and, “In addition to all this, the female slaves suffer every species of degradation and cruelty, which the most wanton barbarity can inflict; they are indecently divested of their clothing, sometimes tied up and severely whipped, sometimes prostrated on the earth, while their naked bodies are torn by the scorpion lash”. (p.8)

“Can any American woman look at these scenes of shocking licentiousness and cruelty, and fold her hands in apathy and say, “I have nothing to do with slavery”? She cannot and be guiltless. (p.9)

     In expressing her avidly opinions for the abolition of women’s suffrage, Sarah was an advocate for having the same rights of the sexes. She felt that women should be regarded the same as men rather than degraded and devalued for the same labor. “This I know is in the case in boarding and other schools with which I have been acquainted, and it is so in every occupation in which the sexes engage indiscriminately”. (p.6)  

Would the life we live now be as it is, if women such as Sarah M. Grimke had not been so passionate and avidly about, “equal for all”?