“Play to your strengths,” Dr. Lois Brown urged, rather than fixate on fulfilling others’ expectations.
Last week, she and Dr. Joan Hedrick spoke on the subject of women, slavery, and abolition at a lecture tied-in to Women’s History Month, hosted by Trinity College. Hedrick kicked off the event by explaining how to Grimké sisters realized women’s oppression through their anti-slavery activism. Hedrick said that while on a speaking tour, Protestant ministers critiqued the sisters for “stepping outside their spheres” as women.
As the saying goes, “well-behaved women seldom make history.”
Both Hedrick and Brown looked at how Harriet Beecher Stowe shook up the status quo through writing. Hedrick asked, “How do you change people’s minds? […] How do you get them to act?”
To her, it seemed, the answer was to do as was done in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: create empathy. When people come around to the right way of thinking, Hedrick said, they will be compelled to act.