In 1839 she, her husband Theodore Dwight Weld and her sister Sarah published American Slavery as It Is, an encyclopedia of slave mistreatment, which became the second most important work of abolitionist literature after Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who recorded her indebtedness to American Slavery as It Is.

Grimké directly responds to Beecher's traditionalist argument on the place of women in all spheres of human activity: "I believe it is the woman's right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed, whether in Church or State: and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers." [16] American Slavery as It Is [ edit ] The Quaker movement was a religious organization that had risen to prominence in 17th century England before migrating over to the United States. Members of the Quaker community that had been the first to formally protest slavery in American history -- staging several demonstrations as early as 1688. It was on her trip to Philadelphia that Sarah Grimké first encountered the Quaker community as well as an organized anti-slavery movement. Angelina's lectures were critical not only of Southern slaveholders but also of Northerners who tacitly complied with the status quo, by purchasing slave-made products and exploiting slaves through the commercial and economic exchanges they made with slave owners in the South. They were met with a considerable amount of opposition, both because Angelina was a female and because she was an abolitionist. Katharine Henry (1997). "Angelina Grimké's Rhetoric of Exposure". American Quarterly. 49 (2): 328–55. doi: 10.1353/aq.1997.0015. S2CID 143719673.Under the Mosaic Law that governed the lives of the ancient Israelites, those so-called slaves were really servants under contract, with the ability to do what no antebellum slave could ever do, namely, walk away. The sacred law of Moses as it pertained to servants, wrote Angelina, “was designed to protect them as men and women, to secure to them their rights as human beings, to guard them from oppression and defend them from violence of every kind.” Moreover,

Colour photographs and artwork by Sarah Acland featured in an exhibition on Colour Revolution in Victorian times at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford during 2023–4, including the first colour photograph of the portrait of the art critic John Ruskin by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais. [16] See also [ edit ] Perry (2002), p. 2 Lerner gives a somewhat different version, in which her father said: "she would have made the greatest jurist in the country." Lerner (1998) p. 25 At the age of 19, Acland met and was influenced by photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Acland took portraits and landscapes. For example, she took a portrait photograph of the Prime Minister William Gladstone during a visit by him to Oxford. [6] On the death of her mother in 1878, Sarah became her father's housekeeper at the family home in Broad Street until his death in 1900. [5] In 1885, she instigated a cabmen's shelter in the middle of Broad Street, which stood there until 1912. 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 proclaimed the injustice of denying freedom to any man or woman. [2] When challenged for speaking in public to mixed audiences of men and women in 1837, she and her sister Sarah fiercely defended women's right to make speeches and participate in political discourse.Philadelphia was a focal point of the growing antislavery movement, and the sisters were swept up in the ferment. Soon defying Quaker moderation on slavery just as they had defied their southern heritage, the Grimke sisters embraced William Lloyd Garrison and what was seen as the radicalism of abolition. In essays appearing in 1837 and 1838, Angelina and Sarah each set out the case for the liberation of women and enslaved people. They joined the Garrisonian lecture circuit, and Angelina developed a reputation as a sterling orator at a time when women were all but prohibited from the public stage. In 1838, Angelina married the abolitionist leader Theodore Dwight Weld in a racially integrated celebration that adhered to the free-produce movement, including no clothing or refreshments produced by enslaved labor. Weld and the sisters shared a household for most of the rest of their lives, and Sarah became a devoted caretaker of Angelina and Theodore’s three children. Their opposition not just to slavery but to racial inequality and segregation, as well as their support for women’s rights, placed them in the vanguard of reform and at odds with many other white abolitionists. With emancipation, they took up the cause of the freedpeople, which they pursued until they died, Sarah in 1873, Angelina in 1879. Her colour photographs were regarded as the finest that had ever been seen by her contemporaries, several years before the release of the Lumiere Autochrome system, which she also practised. This volume provides an introduction to Miss Acland’s photography, illustrating more than 200 examples of her work, from portraits to picturesque views of the landscape and gardens of Madeira. Some fifty specimens of the photographic art and science of her peers from Bodleian collections are also reproduced for the first time, including four unrecorded child portraits by Carroll.