The Grimke Sisters and Sexism
The necessity of birth control
I was listening to an episode of Thee Quaker Podcast about the Grimke sisters (episode with transcript here).
Angelina Grimke was an abolitionist author and speaker. She was a remarkable woman: she grew up the daughter of a slaveowner; her mother was notably harsh to their slaves. Over time, she came to realize the injustice of slavery, moved to the North, befriended a family of black Quakers, and spoke and wrote about the need for immediate abolition. Angelina had extreme views for her time: she believed that slavery needed to be abolished now, not the more moderate “gradual abolition” or “maybe we can return all the black people to Africa?” positions.
I recommend her eloquent and heartbreaking essay, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She cowrote an encyclopedia of how slaves were mistreated with her husband. Harriet Beecher Stowe consulted it heavily when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Angelina had the most supportive husband imaginable. Her husband, Theodore Weld, fell in love with her through reading her writing about abolitionism. Before their marriage, he refused his right to her assets; she left out the promise to obey him from her wedding vows. They delayed their wedding for two years because of her abolitionist work. He was fully supportive of her continuing her abolitionist work, and they cowrote a book together. He was a real Wife Guy.
And then, well, as Thee Quaker Podcast puts it:
Angelina, who is in her mid 30s, gets pregnant and has three children and a few miscarriages in quick succession. She gets a prolapsed uterus and is not well for some time. Both Theodore and Sarah dissuade her from traveling. Both sisters wanted to keep writing, it just doesn’t happen not in any significant way.
She was a public figure for only about three years. Her last public speech was only two days after her wedding.
Because—repeated pregnancies are hard on the body and make you sick. Taking care of small children leaves you no time or energy for writing: a toddler is a sixteen-hour-a-day DDOS attack on your attention. Even with an extraordinarily supportive husband, a married woman trying to do any sort of intellectual work had the deck stacked against her in a way her husband’s would never be. A man could have both career success and love; a (heterosexual) woman couldn’t.
This is why birth control is the sine qua non of women’s liberation. This is why feminist organizations are so monotonous on the subject of reproductive rights. And this is one reason why, before the twentieth century, there are so few great female writers, so few great female painters, so few great female musicians, so few great female scientists, so few great female engineers, so few great female activists, why you can write a history of the world that is almost entirely free of women—
Instead of accomplishments, women had babies.1
If this post motivates you to do something, Population Services International is probably the best family-planning charity. It's unclear to me whether Population Services International better than giving people money and having them buy their own birth control with it, but I suspect so (if nothing else, it helps women get contraception without their husband’s knowledge and permission). As of 2011, GiveWell was uncertain of whether PSI transformed money into birth control access efficiently enough to be a top charity; I think it's probably correct that PSI isn't as good at increasing consumption and preventing deaths as the top charities are. But I think it's valid to care about women's empowerment more than, like, maximizing utility.
I am aware that you know this already, but I would like to state just for the record that successfully raising a child is a h--l of an accomplishment.
This is rather pedantic & beside the main point of this essay, but the "Appeal" which you link to, though consisting in large part of a comparison of contemporary American slavery with the historical forms which appear in the Bible, contains a surprising inaccuracy in the description, not only of ancient slavery, but of the American slave system which was contemporary with its writing. In comparing the means by which American slaveowners got their slaves to those permissible under the laws of ancient Israel, Grimke states: "I will now try the right of the southern planter by the claims of Hebrew masters over their heathen slaves. Were the southern slaves taken captive in war [by their current owners]? No! Were they bought from the heathen? No! for surely, no one will now vindicate the slave-trade so far as to assert that slaves were bought from the heathen who were obtained by that system of piracy." However, literal piracy, i.e. the direct kidnapping of Africans into slavery by slave-trading ships, was in fact rather rare; most African slaves were captured in Africa, usually as prisoners of war, & then bought from their African owners by European or American slave-traders; that is, most African slaves brought to America were enslaved in the same way as most ancient Mediterranean slaves, which Grimke admits was permitted by the laws of ancient Israel. Grimke's misunderstanding of a few aspects of ancient history (e.g. she says that the "servant" or "slave", τῶν δούλων ... εἷς, in Matthew 18 must not have been a slave because he owned property, although this was in fact permitted in the ancient Roman Empire, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome#Peculium ) is understandable since she was not a historian, but I do not understand why she would have so clearly mischaracterized the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which, in her time, was still recent history (Grimke was born in 1805, three years before the US Congress banned international slave trading).