Angelina Emily Grimké Weld (February 20, 1805 – October 26, 1879) was an American political activist, women’s rights advocate, and supporter of the women’s suffrage movement. She and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké are the only white Southern woman who became abolitionists. The sisters lived together as adults, while she was the wife of abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld.
While raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Angelina and Sarah spent their entire adult lives in the North. Angelina’s greatest fame was between 1835, when William Lloyd Garrison published a letter of hers in his anti-slavery newspaper, The Liberator, and May 1838, when she gave a speech to abolitionists with a hostile, noisy, stone-throwing crowd outside the hall. The essays and speeches she produced in that period were incisive arguments to end slavery and to advance women’s rights.
Drawing her views from natural rights theory (as set forth in the Declaration of Independence), the United States Constitution, Christian beliefs in the Bible, and her own childhood memories of the cruel slavery and racism in the South, Grimké priclaimed the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman. She was particularly eloquent on the problem of racial prejudice. When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she and her sister Sarah Moore Grimké fiercely defended women’s right to make speeches and participate in political discourse.
In May 1838, Angelina married Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist. They lived in New Jersey with her sister Sarah, and raised three children, Charles Stuart (1839), Theodore Grimké (1841), and Sarah Grimké Weld (1844). They earned a living by running two schools, the latter located in the Raritan Bay Union utopian community. After the Civil War ended, the Grimké–Weld household moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, where they spent their final years. Angelina and Sarah were active in the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association.