fend their right to speak at all in a society in which women were expected to restrict their activities to a purely domestic sphere. Angelina and Sarah Grimke , left South Carolina because they were swept up in the religious current called the “Second Great Awakening" and felt that Philadelphia Quakers offered a surer form of saving their souls than the Protestant ministers of Charleston. During their influential speaking tour in 1837, about the anti-slavery movement, everyone wanted to hear them, so they broke the prohibitions against women speaking in public and, when clergymen opposed such public speaking by women, they launched the women's rights movement. (Sklar, 1)Angelina Grimkes work makes more sense for me if we take her religious motivations seriously. The change she and her sister introduced into American political culture was very, very large. In a cascade of publications in the late 1830s they created a new language to describe women's participation in public life. That language changed the minds of many people about what was respectable and appropriate behavior for women. It laid the foundation for a women's rights convention movement that began with Seneca Falls, New York, and swept through New England, New York, and the Midwest in the 1850sAngelina Grimkes example in the 1830s was not an abnormal case within the history of American women who reconfigured American political culture. She was an early example of what became an important tradition whereby women relied on religious, ethical, or moral discourse to introduce new ideas and values into American political culture during the “Second Great Awaking”.The theme to the book is the fact that these revolutionary women drew heavily on religious, or moral or ethical language and ideas. This theme was well supported not only by the author’s opinions, but mainly by the amount of reference materials used to support her ideas. Sklar disproves the id...
