Angela Grimke's Bearing Witness Against Slavery

Angela Grimke introduces the horrors of slavery and racism through sensuous imagery and parallelism in her anecdote, emphasizes the need for women to act through an exclamatory sentence and friendly persona, and ensures women that their participation is effective through historical evidence in her speech “Bearing Witness Against Slavery.” As an angry mob of anti-abolitionists rage outside the lecture hall, Grimke must continually battle for her audience’s attention. She holds their focus with an intense pathetic appeal when describing her firsthand experiences with slavery and racism to establish the idea that excused racism in the north relates to empowered slave owners in the south. This becomes an ethical appeal when she calls upon women

Since women could not vote, many abolitionists appealed only to men under the assumption that there was no other way to create change. However, Grimke disagreed and wanted to encourage all people to act against slavery. She knew many women would be paying attention to the speeches only passively since they don’t expect the instructions given will be useful to them. Because of the mob outside the lecture hall screaming threats and throwing rocks, Grimke abandons more subtle, intellectual ways to regain women’s attention in favor of a simple exclamatory sentence: “Women of Philadelphia! Allow me as a Southern woman, with much attachment to the land of my birth, to entreat you to come up to this work.” (Grimke, 191) Three words, shouted over the din outside, are an especially effective way to turn listeners’ heads because they focus on a group most previous speakers - at that convention and in the entire abolitionist movement - had left behind. Grimke’s demand for action did not simply include women but was exclusively addressed to them, which was an unexpected and somewhat shocking choice to an audience who expected male-oriented speeches. This gains the interest of various distracted listeners through shock factor and engages women specifically through the promise of advice for fighting slavery

Because of sexist opinions of the time, many people believed that a woman had no power to create change, especially in government since she could not vote. Women themselves believed this societal expectation, and although Grimke does not reject society’s idea of femininity and womanhood entirely, she specifically rejects their supposed political incompetence in a rebuttal. Using evidence from general and specific political movements in England, all of which were greatly aided by the support of women petitioning the government, Grimke assured her audience that “When the women of these States send up to Congress such a petition our legislators will arise, as did those of England, and say: ‘When all the maids and matrons of the land are knocking at our doors we must legislate.’” (Grimke, 192) This summary of her somewhat vague past points is similarly nonspecific; however, this is still effective since simply alluding to historical events rather than explaining them was sufficient for an audience that knew more about England and its history than contemporary Americans do today. After giving various premises of past and present movements English women were and are participating in, she directly compares English and American governments in this passage when she comes to the