The reverend authors threw up their hands and eyes in holy horror at the "widespread and permanent injury" which seemed to them to threaten "the female character." They scorned the new-fangled notion of woman's independence, and asked for nothing better than the Pauline definition of her "appropriate duties and influence." "The power of women," quoth they, "is in her dependence....

When she assumes the place and tone of man as a public reformer, our care and protection of her seem unnecessary; we put ourselves in self-defence against her, she yields the power which God has given her for protection, and her character becomes unnatural!" These Congregational ministers were not the only representatives of the lordly sex to whom the idea of women's equality was repellent.
Anti-slavery brethren, too, were flinging themselves into all postures of self-defence against the dangerous innovation, which the sisters Grimke were letting into the social establishment, by itinerating "in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Amos A.Phelps was quite as strongly opposed to women preachers, to women assuming the "place and tone of man as a public reformer," as Nehemiah Adams himself.
He remonstrated, with them against their continued assumption of the character of public lecturers and teachers, but to no purpose.

Sarah and Angelina were uncompromising, refused to yield one iota of their rights as "moral and responsible beings." They firmly declined to make their Quakerism and not their womenhood their warrant for "exercising the rights and performing the duties" of rational and responsible beings, for the sake of quieting tender consciences, like that of Phelps, among the anti-slavery brethren.

They were in earnest and demanded to know "whether there is such a thing as male and female virtues, male and female duties." Angelina writes: "My opinion is that there is no difference, and that this false idea has run the ploughshare of ruin over the whole field of morality.

My idea is that whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do.