Fanny Kemble: Actress, Abolitionist, Author

Frances Anne Kemble Butler (born 27 November 1809)

I am embarrassed to admit that, before embarking on this daybook project, I knew only that Fanny Kemble was a successful actress, born into a family of actors, and what little I knew about her as a nineteenth-century professional woman (and friend of the American novelist Henry James) was what led me to posting about her.

Fanny Kemble, 1830

But what I found out, once I began to investigate Kemble's life, was eye-opening--not that it wasn't there all along, but I was completely unaware of the totality of Kemble's career.

So, first, Fanny Kemble as an actress: she was the daughter of two actors, Charles Kemble and his wife, Marie Thérèse de Camp, who was herself born into an acting family (she was born in Vienna but began performing in English theatres in the late eighteenth century). The great Sarah Siddons (born Sarah Kemble) was Fanny's aunt, her father's younger sister; the actress Adelaide de Camp was also Fanny's aunt, her mother's sister. Fanny's younger sister, Adelaide Kemble, was an accomplished and well-known opera singer. 

Fanny Kemble made her stage debut at Covent Garden in 1829, and she gained success almost immediately, credited with having saved her family from economic ruin. She was particularly known for playing Shakespearean roles--Juliet (her debut role), Portia, and Beatrice among them. She made a successful tour of the United States with her father in 1832 and, later in her career, focused on a series of highly regarded (and financially successful) Shakespearean readings.

This much I knew. What I didn't know, however, proved revealing. At first I learned that Kemble was a writer--she wrote and published plays, poetry, memoirs, translations, and, in Notes on Some of Shakespeare's Plays, what we might regard as literary criticism, based on her years of experience with and reflections on the Shakespeare canon (the volume was published in 1882, when Kemble was in her seventies).

More significantly, however, Kemble married Pierce Mease Butler, an American, in 1834--at the time that they met in Philadelphia, Butler was the heir to one of the greatest of U.S. fortunes, including two plantations (a rice plantation on Butler Island, and a sea-island cotton plantation on St. Simon's Island). When he finally inherited his family properties in 1836, he also became one of the largest slaveholders in the United States. 

Kemble was later to write that she did not know the source of Butler's wealth when she married him--she was already a supporter of abolition. But in 1838, although he knew of his wife's views, Butler took her and their two daughters, Sarah and Frances, to live on the plantations in Georgia.

The couple clashed frequently over the morality of slavery and the conditions of the enslaved people on the Butler plantations. Kemble recorded her experiences in a diary--her views on the institution of slavery, her descriptions of the conditions of the slaves and of her encounters with them, her assessment of the other planters with whom the Butlers socialized. All of this she collected in a volume that she would later entitle Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation.

A year after leaving the plantations and returning to Philadelphia--where the Pennsylvania Abolition Society had been founded in 1775, where William Lloyd Garrison had begun publication of The Liberator in 1831, where the American Anti-Slavery Society had been established in 1833, and where Lucretia Mott, Angelina Grimké, and Sarah Grimké were all organizing against slavery--Fanny Kemble would write to a friend, "I have sometimes been haunted with the idea that it was an imperative duty, knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, to do all that lies in my power to show the dangers and the evils of this frightful institution."

Kemble might well have published her Journal as a number of abolitionists were encouraging her to do--except that her marriage to Pierce Butler had become irretrievably broken. Certainly their conflict over slavery was critical--but Butler was also unfaithful, he isolated her, he separated her from her children, and he threatened to sever all ties between her and her daughters if she published her memoirs about life at the Georgia plantations. 

By 1846, the two separated and, increasingly unhappy in the United States, Kemble returned to England where she resumed her role on the stage. But she soon returned to the United States: in 1848, she learned that Butler had sued her for divorce, claiming that Kemble had "willfully, maliciously, and without due cause, deserted him on September 11, 1845."

After a protracted--and expensive--legal battle, Butler was granted his divorce. By the terms of the decision, Butler retained legal custody of the children, though Kemble would have the right to see them for two months in the summers. The daughters were not allowed any other contact with their mother until after they reached the age of twenty-one.

Kemble remained in the United States, giving successful performances of her readings from Shakespeare. She still could not publish the Journal, fearful of the effects that any publication would have on Butler and on her contact with her children. But after the outbreak of the Civil War and concerned about public opinion in England, she finally published Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839 in 1863.

Publication notice in Harper's Weekly

Its publication was explosive and divisive. As Catherine Clinton notes, 

Kemble's riveting account of her husband's slaves provides gripping insight on life in the antebellum South. As the wife of a planter, Kemble had unimpeded access to plantation affairs and was especially poignant and pointed when she allowed the voices of slave women, so seldom heard during this era, to shine through in the pages of her journal. 

Fanny and her daughter Sarah were reconciled once Sarah reached the age of twenty-one. Fanny's younger daughter Frances remained with her father and, bitter over her mother's Journal, later published her own memoir in 1883, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation, intended to refute her mother's work. 

As for Butler--he lost his vast fortune in gambling and stock speculation. He was forced to liquidate his assets, including the sale all his slaves, by auction, on 3 March 1859. It was the largest single sale of human beings in U.S., known forever as "the weeping time."

Kemble continued performing in the United States, in Europe and in England--she died in London on 15 January 1893.

There are several noteworthy biographies, but instead of linking to them (they are easily found), I thought I'd link to two online essays that focus on Kemble's abolitionist views and her Journal: Catherine Clinton's essay is in the New Georgia Encyclopedia, which you can access online by clicking here; and the entry on Kemble at the African-American Registry, which you can access by clicking here.

You can buy various print-on-demand reprint editions of Kemble's Journal, but the book is also available through Project Gutenberg (click here) and at the Internet Archive you can read an online facsimile of the 1863 American edition, advertised above (click here).

Lydia Maria Child, Social Reformer and Political Activist

Lydia Maria Francis Child (died 20 October 1880)

Born on 11 February 1802, Lydia Francis should be remembered today for much more than her "Over the River and Through the Woods" Thanksgiving poem.*

Lydia Maria Child, 1870

The daughter of David Convers Francis and Susannah Rand, Lydia Francis was educated at home in Medford, Massachusetts, then at a local "dame school"--a private school where girls received a primary-level education and "necessary" female skills like sewing and embroidery--and, then, at a women's seminary. (By contrast, her brother got a Harvard education.)

After her mother's death, Lydia was sent to live with a sister and trained to be a teacher. The years she spent with her sister in Maine also introduced her to an impoverished community of Abenaki and Penobscot Indians, awakening in her an awareness of the dire situation faced by Native American peoples. 

After a brief stint at teaching, she moved back to Massachusetts. At age nineteen, she renamed herself "Maria" (she didn't like the name Lydia) and began her real education with her brother, who introduced her to Homer and Milton and challenged her to write.

Her first novel, Hobomak: A Tale of Early Times, was completed in six weeks and published in 1824--set in Salem, it told the story of a young Puritan woman who scandalized her family and community by marrying an Indian, with whom she had a child. (Double scandal--the novel's heroine later married a second time, an Episcopalian!) The novel's themes, which challenged racial and religious views, ensured its success and Francis's celebrity. Lydia Maria Francis was just twenty-two.

In 1824 Maria Francis also opened a school and, two years later, began publication of a bi-monthly magazine for children, Juvenile Miscellany, the first periodical for children in the United States. She would continue to write and publish--novels, biographies, poetry, guides to housekeeping and child-rearing, and histories--throughout her lifetime. 

In 1828 she married David Lee Child, a man whose political and social activism corresponded with and extended her own. By 1831 she was involved with the abolition movement. Perhaps her most significant work was published in 1833, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a history of slavery in the United States.

She joined the American Anti-Slavery Society, working alongside Lucretia Mott, and in 1840 became the editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. In her anti-slavery fiction, like the novel The Quadroons, published in 1842, ten years before Uncle Tom's Cabin, she exposed the realities of slavery to those who did not read anti-slavery pamphlets or anti-slavery periodicals. Child also edited Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, first published in 1861.

Nor did she forget her interest in the plight of the American Indians. She detailed white atrocities against native populations in The First Settlers of New-England: or, Conquest of the Pequods, Narragansets and Pokanokets: As Related by a Mother to Her Children, and Designed for the Instruction of Youth (1829) and, still working on the issue forty years later, An Appeal for the Indians (1868).

Her work in the abolition movement also involved her in the struggle for women's rights. Although she published a number of books for women that focused on domesticity (she published The Frugal Housewife the year after she married), she also wrote to support women's equality. 

In addition to publishing a series of biographies of notable women, her two-volume The History of the Condition of Women in Various Ages and Nations was published in 1835, then revised and republished ten years later as Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. Her Letters from New York, also filling two volumes, included editorials on the topic of women's rights. As she argued, 

That the present position of women in society is the result of physical force is obvious enough; whosoever doubts it, let her reflect why she is afraid to go out in the evening without the protection of a man. What constitutes the danger of aggression? Superior physical strength, uncontrolled by the moral sentiments. If physical strength were in complete subjection to moral influence, there would be no need of outward protection. That animal instinct and brute force now govern the world, is painfully apparent in the condition of women everywhere. . . . 

This sort of politeness to women is what men call gallantry--an odious word to every sensible woman because she sees that it is merely the flimsy veil which foppery throws over sensuality to conceal its grossness. So far is it from indicating sincere esteem and affection for women, that the profligacy of a nation may, in general, be fairly measured by its gallantry. This taking away rights and condescending to grant privileges is an old trick of the physical force principle, and with the immense majority, who only look on the surface of things, this mask effectually disguises an ugliness which would otherwise be abhorred. The most inveterate slaveholders are probably those who take most pride in dressing their household servants handsomely and who would be most ashamed to have the name of being unnecessarily cruel. And profligates, who form the lowest and most sensual estimate of women, are the very ones to treat them with an excess of outward deference. . . .

Along with Lucretia Mott, she knew and worked with women we have met before, including Angelina Grimké and Margaret Fuller. 

Many of Child's works are available online through Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive. There is a detailed biographical essay posted at The Poetry Foundation website--Deborah Clifford's biography is followed by an extended bibliography of primary sources and a great list of material for further reading, including biographies of Lydia Maria Child.

*Written for Thanksgiving and published in her 1844 collection of children's verse, Flowers for Children, the poem was set to music by an unknown composer and is now commonly regarded as a Christmas song.

Sarah Moore Grimké: Abolitionist, Social Activist, Suffragist

Sarah Moore Grimké, American abolitionist (7 July 1878)

Earlier in the year, on 20 February, I posted an entry on the abolitionist Angelina Grimké, and in that essay, I included a fair amount about her older sister, Sarah Moore Grimké. The two were both social activists, working for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights. 

For once I haven't indicated the significance of the date in the heading to this post--it's complicated. This is certainly not the most obvious date for Grimké.

She was born on 26 November 1792 and died on 23 December 1873, so it's not that we don't know when she was born and when she died, basic information that is unknown for many of the women I've been writing about. 

There are other significant dates in her life as well--my original plan was to write about Grimké later this week, on 11 July, which was the date of the first of her letters "on the equality of the sexes." But if I did that, I wouldn't be able to write about Delarivier Manley on that day!

So here I am, with a roundabout date for Grimké: on 7 July 1878, almost five years after Sarah's death, her nephew, Francis J. Grimké, was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Why is that so special? 

Francis J. Grimké was the son of Henry Grimké, Sarah and Angelina's brother. Henry was a wealthy planter in Charleston. But Francis was not the son of Henry and his wife, Selina Simmons, but of Henry and his slave, a woman named Nancy Weston.

Henry Grimké educated the three sons that Weston bore him and freed them in his 1852 will, placing the boys under the guardianship of their white half-brother, Montague. But Montague did not treat his half-siblings well, and in 1860, he threatened to sell Francis, then ten years old, into slavery. The boy ran away, and when he returned, Montague made good his threat. Francis was not free until the end of the Civil War.

Both Grimké sisters had left the South long before the death of their brother, unable to live with the horrors of slavery. Sarah had gone with her father to Philadelphia in 1819 so he could consult medical professionals there, and she had then gone with him to New Jersey. She had returned to Philadelphia after her father died in August of 1819 and then spent some time in Charleston before returning finally to Philadelphia. She went back to Charleston again in 1827, when she "rescued" her younger sister, Angelina. By 1829, both Grimké sisters were in Philadelphia, committed to the cause of fighting against slavery and for women.

It wasn't until after the Civil War, in 1868, that Sarah Grimké learned of her brother's three children by Nancy Weston. While reading an article in The Anti-Slavery Standard, Angelina Grimké noted that the writer referred to a young man named Archibald Grimké, "just out of slavery." After telling her sister Sarah about the coincidence, Angelina wrote to Archibald, wondering if there were a connection.

He responded, and for the first time the two Grimké sisters learned about Archibald, Francis, and John, her brother's children; she and Sarah publicly acknowledged the three boys as their nephews. With their connections and support, Francis was educated at the Lincoln University and then at Princeton Theological Seminary. He graduated and was ordained on 7 July 1878.

So 7 July is a roundabout date for this post, but it adds a critical element to the story of the Grimké sisters.

As for Sarah, more specifically, she published a series of letters on women's equality, written in 1837, each of the fifteen letters devoted to one particular aspect of women's situation, among them: "The Original Equality of Woman"; "Woman Subject Only To God"; "Social Intercourse of the Sexes"; "Women in Asia and Africa"; "On the Condition of Women in the United States"; "Heroism of Women--Women in Authority"; Intellect of Woman"; "Dress of Women"; "Legal Disabilities of Women"; "Relation of Husband and Wife"; "Ministry of Women"; and "Man Equally Guilty with Woman in the Fall,"

The letters were published in 1838 as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman; you can read them online at various sites, but I'll link you to the first edition, available at Google Books.

And I love the way she signs off at the end of each letter: "Thine for the oppressed in the bonds of womanhood" and its variation, "Thine in the bonds of womanhood."

For an online biographical essay about Angelina and Sarah Grimké posted at the Women's Rights National Historical Park website, click here. (Did you even know there was a Women's Rights National Historical Park? I sure didn't!) For a biography and analysis, I suggest Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition.

Update, 21 January 2023: Keri Greenidge's The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in America has appeared on a number of "notable books" lists for 2022. Described as a "stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family." For more, here is Michael Jeffries's New York Times Review.

Update, 14 July 2026: Serious questions have been raised about Keri Greenidge's scholarship in her book on the Grimkés. On the issues and the repercussions, see Neil Vigdor's "A Decorated Researcher Comes under Fire," just published in the New York Times (click here).

The First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women

The First Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (convened 9 May 1837)

On this day in 1837, 75 women delegates convened in New York to discuss their role in the anti-slavery movement. 

On behalf of the convention,

Angelina Grimké's "appeal"

addresses women, calling for

them to battle against the 

American institution of slavery

The women came from ten different states and represented twenty abolitionist groups.

Among them were many women who would later be active in the suffrage movement, including including Lucretia Mott; the Grimké Sisters, Angelina and Sarah; and Lydia Maria Child.

Notable among the delegates were five African-American women, including the abolitionist Julia Williams, who had been a student at Prudence Crandall's "School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color," as well as the wives and daughters of slaveholders.

For a detailed account of the convention, you can access a .pdf of Ira V. Brown's "'Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?' The Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, 1837-39" (Pennsylvania History 50, no. 1 [1983]), by clicking here.

Angelina Emily Grimké: Abolitionist and Suffragist

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (born 20 February 1805)

Before the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and before Susan B. Anthony began working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the suffrage movement, the political activists Angelina Grimké and her older sister, Sarah, dedicated themselves to the pursuit of social justice.

Born to a slave-holding family in South Carolina, Angelina Grimké resisted the values of her family and her class. As a child, she noted the violence inflicted on the bodies and minds of the slaves around her and reacted strongly to their suffering.

She also demonstrated her strength in her convictions; when she was thirteen, she found that she was unable to take the pledge required for her as part of the Episcopalian confirmation, and she refused to participate.

She converted to Presbyterianism, then to Quakerism. By 1829 she had decided she could no longer live in the slave-holding South and joined Sarah in Philadelphia, where she began attending anti-slavery meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison's publication of one of Grimké's letters in The Liberator in 1835 launched her public career in the abolitionist movement. 

Grimké frequently spoke to crowds of both men and women, and in so doing, violated a sense of "appropriate" female behavior. In 1838, she addressed a state legislative committee in Massachusetts, not only speaking against slavery but in support of women's right--and obligation--to oppose injustice: “I stand before you,” she said, “on behalf of the 20,000 women of Massachusetts whose names are enrolled on petitions [which] relate to the great and solemn subject of slavery.”

Grimké was the first woman in the United States to address a legislative body. As historian Gerda Lerner notes, “It never occurred to [Grimké] that she should abide by the superior judgment of her male relatives or that anyone might consider her inferior" for being a woman. 

After she married Theodore Weld in 1838, Grimké's public visibility declined, although her personal commitment never flagged. She died in 1879.

Angelina Grimké's An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) is available through Project Gutenberg by clicking here.

In 1837, Catherine Beecher replied to Grimké in An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Female, arguing against women's participation in the abolitionist movement. As "subordinate" creatures, women are "out of their place" if they attempt to take an active role--they should leave the arguments to men.

Grimké's 1838 Letters to Catharine Beecher is a series of essays addressing Beecher's objections. In Letter XI, "The Sphere of Man and Woman as Moral Beings the Same," Grimké turns her attention from a focus on abolition to equality between the sexes, an argument and analysis she continues in the twelfth essay.

In Letter XII, "Human Rights Not Founded on Sex," Grimké writes, "When human beings are regarded as moral beings, sex, instead of being enthroned upon the summit, administering upon rights and responsibilities, sinks into insignificance and nothingness. My doctrine then is, that whatever it is morally right for man to do, it is morally right for woman to do." The differences between men and women are not due to different natures or abilities, but to social expectations and norms:

man has been converted into the warrior and clothed with sternness and those other kindred qualities, which in common estimation belong to his character as a man, whilst woman has been taught to lean upon an arm of flesh, to sit as a doll arrayed in "gold, and pearls, and costly array" [1 Timothy 2:9], to be admired for her personal charms, and caressed and humored like a spoiled child, or converted into a mere drudge to suit the convenience of her lord and master. Thus have all the diversified relations of life been filled with "confusion and every evil work" [James 3:16]. This principle has given to man a charter for the exercise of tyranny and selfishness, pride and arrogance, lust and brutal violence. It has robbed woman of essential rights, the right to think and speak and act on all great moral questions, just as men think and speak and act; the right to share their responsibilities, perils and toils; the right to fulfill the great end of her being, as a moral, intellectual, and immortal creature, and of glorifying God in her body and her spirit which are his. Hitherto, instead of being a help meet to man in the highest, noblest sense of the term as a companion, a co-worker, an equal, she has been a mere appendage of his being an instrument of his convenience and pleasure, the pretty toy with which he wiled away his leisure moments, or the pet animal whom he humored into playfulness and submission. Woman, instead of being regarded as the equal of man, has uniformly been looked down upon as his inferior, a mere gift to fill up the measure of his happiness. In "the poetry of romantic gallantry" [here Grimké is quoting Beecher's Essay], it is true, she has been called "the last best gift of God to man" [Paradise Lost 6.19];  but I believe I speak forth the words of truth and soberness when I affirm, that woman never was given to man. She was created, like him, in the image of God, and crowned with glory and honor; created only a little lower than the angels—not, as is almost universally assumed, a little lower than man. . . .*

For an online biographical essay about Angelina and Sarah Grimké by historian Carol Berkin, click here. For a biography and analysis, I suggest Gerda Lerner's The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition.

Update, 21 January 2023: Keri Greenidge's The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in America has appeared on a number of "notable books" lists for 2022. Described as a "stunning counternarrative of the legendary abolitionist Grimke sisters that finally reclaims the forgotten Black members of their family." For more, here is Michael Jeffries's New York Times Review.

Update, 14 July 2026: Serious questions have been raised about Keri Greenidge's scholarship in her book on the Grimkés. On the issues and the repercussions, see Neil Vigdor's "A Decorated Researcher Comes under Fire," just published in the New York Times (click here).

*In quoting from Grimké's letter, I have added the sources of her quotations and regularized the spelling, punctuation, and capitalization of the nineteenth-century original.