Thesis: Throughout their lives, women in Antebellum America were constantly faced with difficult choices, impacted by both gender and social class, that demanded significant and frequently unfair sacrifices to family and important relationships in order to achieve any progress toward equality for themselves and future generations. Sue Monk Kidd's central protagonist Sarah Grimke is faced with nearly impossible decisions around both family and societal status as an upper middle-class Southern woman within a slaveholding family in The Invention of Wings. While her mother raised her to consider slavery “our way of life” and to “make your peace with it”, Sarah is deeply unsettled by her implicit participation in such a horrific practice (Kidd 51).…show more content… As Sarah’s passions turn to activism, she slowly realizes she will have to choose between her position as a daughter to a prominent judge within the planter class and assuming a role as a prominent abolitionist and women’s rights suffragist. While she fervently believes that “To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil”(114), the idea that she will be disowned and forced to leave that she has known for speaking out still understandably gives her pause, as unmarried single women were considered dependant upon their families in all aspects of their lives, and to lose both financial and emotional support from one’s family would be personally, economically, and socially devastating (Riggs). Furthermore, Sarah struggles with the decision to marry, as that choice would also bring with it a marked loss of rights and personal agency, as “once a woman was married.the law viewed her husband as her master and her legal rights were unimportant”
