Biography of Angelina Grimké, American Abolitionist

Biography of Angelina Grimkà ©, American Abolitionist Angelina Grimkà © (February 21, 1805–October 26, 1879) was a southern woman from a slaveholding family who, along with her sister Sarah, became an advocate of abolitionism. The sisters late became advocates of womens rights after their anti-slavery efforts were criticized because their outspokenness violated traditional gender roles. With her sister and her husband Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimkà © wrote American Slavery As It Is, a major abolitionist text. Fast Facts: Angelina Grimkà © Known For: Grimkà © was an influential abolitionist and womens rights advocate.Born: February 20, 1805 in Charleston, South CarolinaParents: John Faucheraud Grimkà ©Ã‚  and Mary SmithDied: October 26, 1879 in Boston, MassachusettsSpouse: Theodore Weld (m. 1838-1879)Children: Theodore, Sarah Early Life Angelina Emily Grimkà © was born on February 20, 1805, in Charleston, South Carolina. She was the 14th child of Mary Smith Grimkà © and John Faucheraud Grimkà ©. Mary Smiths wealthy family included two governors during colonial times. John Grimkà ©, who was descended from German and Huguenot settlers, had been a Continental Army captain during the Revolutionary War. He served in the state House of Representatives and was the states chief justice. The family spent their summers in Charleston and the rest of the year on the Beaufort plantation. The Grimkà © plantation produced rice until the invention of the cotton gin made cotton more profitable. The family owned many slaves, including field hands and household servants. Angelina, like her sister Sarah, was offended by slavery from an early age. She fainted one day at the seminary when she saw a slave boy her own age opening a window and noticed that he could barely walk and was covered on his legs and back with bleeding wounds from a whipping. Sarah tried to console and comfort her, but Angelina was shaken by the experience. At age 13, Angelina refused confirmation in the Anglican church of her family because of the churchs support for slavery. When Angelina was 13, her sister Sarah accompanied their father to Philadelphia and then to New Jersey for his health. Their father died there, and Sarah returned to Philadelphia and joined the Quakers, drawn by their anti-slavery stance and their inclusion of women in leadership roles. Sarah briefly returned home to South Carolina before moving to Philadelphia. It fell on Angelina, in Sarahs absence and after her fathers death, to manage the plantation and care for her mother. Angelina tried to persuade her mother to set at least the household slaves free, but her mother refused. In 1827, Sarah returned for a longer visit. Angelina decided she would become a Quaker, remain in Charleston, and persuade her fellow southerners to oppose slavery. In Philadelphia Within two years, Angelina gave up hope of having any impact while remaining at home. She moved to join her sister in Philadelphia, and she and Sarah set out to educate themselves. Angelina was accepted at Catherine Beechers school for girls, but their Quaker meeting refused to give permission for her to attend. The Quakers also discouraged Sarah from becoming a preacher. Angelina became engaged, but her fiance died in an epidemic. Sarah also received an offer of marriage but refused it, thinking she might lose the freedom she valued. They received word about that time that their brother Thomas had died. He had been a hero to the sisters, for he was involved in emancipating slaves by sending volunteers back to Africa. Abolitionism The sisters turned to the growing abolitionist movement. Angelina joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, which was associated with the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833. On August 30, 1835, Angelina Grimkà © wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, a leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. Angelina mentioned in the letter her first-hand knowledge of slavery. To Angelinas shock, Garrison printed her letter in his newspaper. The letter was reprinted widely and Angelina found herself famous and at the center of the anti-slavery world. The letter became part of a widely-read anti-slavery pamphlet. The Quakers of Philadelphia did not approve of Angelinas anti-slavery involvement, however, nor of Sarahs less radical involvement. At the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Quakers, Sarah was silenced by a male Quaker leader. The sisters decided to move to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1836, where the Quakers were more supportive of abolitionism. In Rhode Island, Angelina published a tract, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South. She argued that women could and should end slavery through their influence. Her sister Sarah wrote An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States. In that essay, Sarah confronted Biblical arguments typically used by the clergy to justify slavery. Sarah followed that with another pamphlet, An Address to Free Colored Americans. While these were published by two southerners and addressed to southerners, they were reprinted widely in New England. In South Carolina, the tracts were publicly burned. Speaking Career Angelina and Sarah received many invitations to speak, first at anti-slavery conventions and then at other venues in the north. Fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld helped train the sisters to improve their speaking skills. The sisters toured, speaking in 67 cities in 23 weeks. At first, they spoke to all-woman audiences, but then men began to attend the lectures as well. A woman speaking to a mixed audience was considered scandalous. The criticism helped them understand that social limitations on women were part of the same system that upheld slavery. It was arranged for Sarah to speak to the Massachusetts legislature on slavery. Sarah became ill and Angelina filled in for her. Angelina was thus the first woman to speak to a United States legislative body. After returning to Providence, the sisters still traveled and spoke but also wrote, this time appealing to their northern audience. Angelina wrote an Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States in 1837, while Sarah wrote an Address to the Free Colored People of the United States. They spoke at the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Catherine Beecher publicly criticized the sisters for not keeping to the proper feminine sphere, i.e. the private, domestic sphere. Angelina responded with Letters to Catherine Beecher, arguing for full political rights for women- including the right to hold public office. Marriage Angelina married fellow abolitionist Theodore Weld in 1838, the same young man who had helped prepare the sisters for their speaking tour. The marriage ceremony included friends and fellow activists both white and black. Six former slaves of the Grimkà © family attended. Weld was a Presbyterian; the ceremony was not a Quaker one. Garrison read the vows and Theodore renounced all legal power that laws at the time gave him over Angelinas property. They left obey out of the vows. Because the wedding was not a Quaker wedding and her husband was not a Quaker, Angelina was expelled from the Quaker meeting. Sarah was also expelled for attending the wedding. Angelina and Theodore moved onto a farm in New Jersey and Sarah moved in with them. Angelinas first child was born in 1839; two more and a miscarriage followed. The family focused their lives around raising the three Weld children and on demonstrating that they could manage a household without slaves. They took in boarders and opened a school. Friends, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her husband, visited them at the farm. Angelinas health, however, began to decline. American Slavery As It Is In 1839, the Grimkà © sisters published American Slavery As It Is: Testimony From a Thousand Witnesses. The book was later used as a source by Harriet Beecher Stowe for her 1852 book Uncle Toms Cabin. The sisters kept up their correspondence with other anti-slavery and pro womens rights activists. One of their letters was to the 1852 womens rights convention in Syracuse, New York. In 1854, Angelina, Theodore, Sarah, and the children moved to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, operating a school there until 1862. All three supported the Union in the Civil War, seeing it as a path to end slavery. Theodore Weld traveled and lectured occasionally. The sisters published An Appeal to the Women of the Republic, calling for a pro-Union womens convention. When it was held, Angelina was among the speakers. The sisters and Theodore moved to Boston and became active in the womens rights movement after the Civil War. All three served as officers of the Massachusetts Womens Suffrage Association. On March 7, 1870, as part of a protest involving 42 other women, Angelina and Sarah illegally voted. Death Sarah died in Boston in 1873. Angelina suffered several strokes shortly after Sarahs death and became paralyzed. She died in Boston in 1879. Legacy Grimkà ©s activism had a profound effect on the abolitionist and womens rights movements. In 1998, she was posthumously inducted into the National Womens Hall of Fame. Sources Browne, Stephen H.  Angelina Grimke Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. Michigan State University Press, 2012.Grimkà ©, Sarah Moore, et al.  On Slavery and Abolitionism: Essays and Letters. Penguin Books, 2014.

Definition and Examples of Pejoration in Language

Definition and Examples of Pejoration in Language In linguistics, pejoration is the downgrading or depreciation of a words meaning, as when a word with a positive sense develops a negative one. Pejoration is much more common than the opposite process, called amelioration. Here are some examples and observations from other writers: Silly The word silly is a classic example of pejoration, or gradual worsening of meaning. In early Middle English (around 1200), sely (as the word was then spelled) meant happy, blissful, blessed, fortunate, as it did in Old English. . . . The original meaning was followed by a succession of narrower ones, including spiritually blessed, pious, holy, good, innocent, harmless. . . . As the form (and pronunciation) sely changed to silly in the 1500s, the earlier meanings passed into increasingly less favorable senses such as weak, feeble, insignificant. . . . By the late 1500s, the words use declined to its present-day meaning of lacking good sense, empty-headed, senseless, foolish, as in This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard (1595, Shakespeare, A Midsummer Nights Dream). (Sol Steinmetz, Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meanings. Random House, 2008) Hierarchy Hierarchy shows a similar, though more pronounced, deterioration. Originally applied to an order or a host of angels from the fourteenth century, it has steadily moved down the scale of being, referring to a collective body of ecclesiastical rulers from c. 1619, from whence the similar secular sense develops c.1643 (in Miltons tract on divorce). . . . Today one frequently hears of the party hierarchy, business hierarchies, and the like, denoting only the top of the hierarchy, not the whole order, and conveying the same nuances of hostility and envy implied in elite.(Geoffrey Hughes, Words in Time: A Social History of the English Vocabulary. Basil Blackwell, 1988) Discreet [U]sing language to spin may worsen the meaning of the substituted language, a process linguists call pejoration. That has happened to the previously innocuous adjective discreet, when used in personal columns as a euphemism for illicit sexual meetings. A recent Wall Street Journal article quoted the customer service manager of an online dating service as saying he banned the use of discreet from his service because its often code for married and looking to fool around. The site is for singles only.(Gertrude Block, Legal Writing Advice: Questions and Answers. William S. Hein, 2004) Attitude Let me give one final example of this kind of semantic corrosionthe word attitude. . . . Originally, attitude was a technical term, meaning position, pose. It shifted to mean mental state, mode of thinking (presumably whatever was implied by someones posture). In colloquial usage, it has since deteriorated. Hes got an attitude means hes got a confronting manner (probably uncooperative, antagonistic); something to be corrected by parents or teachers. Whereas once this would have been rendered Hes got a bad attitude or an attitude problem, the negative sense has now become overwhelming.(Kate Burridge, Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History. HarperCollins Australia, 2011)​ Pejoration and Euphemism One specific source of  pejoration is euphemism . . .: in avoiding some taboo word, speakers may use an alternative which in time acquires the meaning of the original and itself falls out of use. Thus, in English, disinformation has replaced lying in some political contexts, where it has recently been joined by being economical with the truth.(April M. S. McMahon, Understanding Language Change. Cambridge University Press, 1999) Generalizations About Pejoration Some few generalizations are possible:Words meaning inexpensive have an inherent likelihood to become negative in connotation, often highly negative. Lat. [Latin] vilis at a good price (i.e. inevitably, low price) commonplace trashy, contemptible, low (the current meaning of It. [Italian], Fr. [French], NE. [Modern English] vile).Words for clever, intelligent, capable commonly develop connotations (and eventually denotations of sharp practice, dishonesty, and so on: . . . NE crafty dishonestly clever is from OE craeftig strong(ly)l skillful(ly) (NHG [New High German] krftig strong; the ancient sense strong, strength of this family of words fades very early in the history of English, where the usual senses pertain to skill).NE cunning has very negative connotations in present-day English, but in Middle English it meant learned, skillful, expert . . ..(Andrew L. Sihler, Language History: An Introduction. John Benjamins, 2000) Pronunciation: PEDGE-e-RAY-shun Also Known As: deterioration, degeneration EtymologyFrom the Latin, worse