Page:From Anne Warren Weston to Boston Female Anti-slavery Society; Monday, August 21, 1837.pdf/4

 not now addresing woman of this clas. We trust that all who have embraced the A.S. cause from Christian motives will feel that touching this question they owe a responsibility not to man but to God alone. And here we may well pause & consider how different are the views with which He regards woman's sphere & duties from those which the generality of men entertain. While by man too frequently regarded as a being whose chief object should be to subserve his enjoyment or convenience of whose duties & responsibilities he is to be the judge, whose very final accountability is almost merged in his other & widely differing is the duty & the destiny his Creator appoints. Individually must she judge of her duty, individually perform it & God has said that each one of their own doings shall give account to him. Is it then wise to govern our own views of duty by the opinions of others? Who are those who are now opposing woman's influence as exerted in favour of the E(?) (?) As a general thing are they not the men whose opposition to the course of the injured and outraged Slave has ever been bitter & unrelenting. Will you allow these men who have been for years unmindful of there own most solemn duties to prescribe to you yours. Shall they whose influence is given to a system that considers women as goods & chattels be esteemed by you as fit judges of the sphere you shall occupy? I know that the sneering allusions, false representations & contemptuous sarcasms to which we are subjected may be to some of us a bitter taste(?) But if in view of these things our hearts fail us, let us look to the faith & view of the sphere that women there occupies shall strengthen us to endure. Woman labouring in the rice fields of Carolina & in the burning sugar plantations of Louisiana under the lash of a driver is (?) pe(?) fearfully "out of her sphere". Woman holding her fellow creatures, as property, shamelesly advertising uns(?)ys in the public papers and trading in broken hearts & outraged affections is we allow, very much "out of her sphere." Woman, upholding by her influence this system, pleading for its continuance, using all her ingenuity to palliate its guilt, and throwing obstacles in the way of emancipation, appears to us also to be out of her sphere, but with regard to those women who labour for the extinction of Slavery, who petition Congres for its abolition, who urge the claims of the slave whenever opportunity presents, who in time "feels for those in bonds as bound with them" of such such(?) we say they are in the very sphere to which God has appointed every Christian, they are but fulfilling the Augustine injunction to do good to all men as they have opportunity."

A few lines more and we will close a communication that we fear is already too long. The path that Sarah & Angelina Grimké have marked out for themselves is one in which they will probably