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CHAPTER 4 "An Entirely New Contest": Grimke, Beecher, and the Language of Reform Saturday, 12August 1837. Groton, Massachusetts. In the midst ofher speaking tour and with a twelve-mile ride to Roxboro scheduled for the Sabbath, Angelina relaxed in the way she knew best: by writing letters. In Theodore Weld she could count on a reader at once sympathetic and challenging, and on this day she had much to communicate. After months of travel throughout New England and endless hours spent in speaking and debate, the sisters had accumulated enough notoriety to last a lifetime. For Angelina, the experience was a learning one indeed. However anxious she may have been about such exposure, Grimke could not escape a rare moment of delight in the scenes she had helped create. "My auditors literally sit some times with 'mouths agape and eyes astare:" she recalled, "so that I cannot help smiling in the midst of 'rhetorical flourishes' to witness their perfect amazement at hearing a woman speak in the churches:'l Although it is difficult to picture her with mouth agape and eyes astare, Catharine Beecher was surely among those watching closelythe scene before her. As a prominent ifnot altogether successful advocate for educational reform, and as the eldest daughter ofthe famed Beecher clan, Catharine had a certain claim on public consciousness. The Grimke tour thus represented to her something more than a curiosity. Beecher herselfhad undertaken the ardors of an Eastern tour throughout the spring, summer, and fall of 1836 to promote, not antislavery, but various and vague schemes for new schools and schooling. During that tour, as Kathryn Kish Sklar observes, Beecher "had counted Angelina Grimke among her chief competitors for the allegiance of a newly self-conscious generation of American women:' In their respective ways, Beecher and Grimke understood the stakes in this competition to be very high, higher, indeed, than the personal fortunes of either; and they knew, too, that the world in which it was to be played out contained in it much that was unprecedented. In the words of Grimke, "we are placed very unexpectedly in a very trying situation, in the forefront of an entirely new contest-a contest for the rights ofwoman as a moral, intelligent and responsible being:'2 84 ANGELINA GRIMKE How Beecher and Grimke chose to contest the province of woman can tell us much about the province of rhetoric itself. Their public exchange, represented here by the 1837 publication ofCatharine's An Essay on Slavery andAbolition with Reference to the Duty ofAmerican Females and Angelina's response in Letters to Catharine E. Beecher, is an outstanding example of the art as a form of public moral argument. Together, Beecher and Grimke managed to display, defend, and challenge the basic commonplaces through which the reform imagination of antebellum America was exercised.3 More specifically, this chapter is designed to illustrate that the encounter between Beecher and Grimke was not only a public argument ofan extraordinary kind, but that its extraordinariness is due in no small part to the fact that the contest is itself about public argument. It represents a serious and systematic discussion of the language of reform, the province of public action, and the role of women in the work of the early republic. I suggest further that in the end Grimke triumphs because her arguments are entailed consistently from the very structure of the commitments that brought the two disputants into contact; as a public, political, and rhetorical performance, Grimke's encounter with Beecher enacts the promises of public life even as it pushes open spaces for greater participation in the work of public moral reform. The exchange put on exhibit, moreover, the image of two women radically different in background and belief, yet similar in their commitment to reform, their command of the symbolic resources of public debate, and their ability to contest a principle without diminishing the humanity of its advocate. There is also, of course, an unmistakable irony in Catharine Beecher, the learned, articulate, tireless campaigner for the reform and advancement of female education, who, seemingly unable to shed the mantle offamily and culture, must defend the home as the privileged site of woman's life. In this, Catherine Birney wrote, "she presented the singular anomaly of a strong-minded woman, already successful in taking care of herself, advocating woman's subordination to man, and prescribing for her efforts at self-help limits so narrow that only the few favored as she was could venture...

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