The opening and closing of the poem are very powerful because they are so blunt and to the point without the flowery language see in the rest of the poem. She opens with the words, "She sat upon the pile by her dead lord...", and the poem ends with the line "That burning mother's scream ...". It is the story of an Indian woman who follows the practice of Suttee, or joining her husband on his funeral pyre. Sigourney does not pull her punches. She makes it clear that the people in her community approve of what she is doing and that she is not doing it out of love. Apparently she disliked her husband, because the poem says that she has been "bound ... fast down to her loathsome partner."

But Sigourney does not allow the reader to see the Suttee as some bizarre custom followed by people who are too different from the reader to connect to. She shows the young Indian woman as a kind of "Every Woman." Even as she knows her fate, she hears

Sigourney does not explain why the practice occurred, and that is a good choice, because nothing should pretend to justify such a practice.

She urges the women to do things that are unlikely, such as liberating the slaves their families own. In fact they did not have that right as the head of the household actually owned the slaves. She says radical things for the day, arguing that they should not follow laws when the laws are immoral. She encourages them to teach their slaves to read and write even if it is illegal to do so in their state. With this argument, she makes an earlier point more subtly: how can slaves be animals or chattel if they can learn to read and write?

Her writing reflects her membership in the Society of Friends. In her letter, she appeals to Southern Christian women to open their eyes and heart to the wrongness of slavery. She does so in a logical and methodical way. First, she makes a personal connection with her target audience. The connection is that they share a religious faith, Christianity.

She also suggests that these women extend kindness if they live in a slave-owning family, including regular meals of good food. Throughout the essay she gives such very specific advice that those who hear her speak or read her words cannot possibly say, "I'm only one person and a woman -- what can I do?"

Harper was another American female writer greatly concerned with slavery, the rights of blacks, and women's suffrage. Like the other two writers, she combined her social issues with her writing. Harper was born a free black who knew the sting of discrimination first hand. Harper knows the suffering of her people first hand, so her language isn't as restrained as Grimke's. She describes what it is like to live as black in America, whether slave or free, in vivid detail. The combination of the two essays together is quite powerful, and the reader begins to understand why feelings against slavery grew during the 19th century.

Harper's essay was written in 1857, shortly before the Civil War. In that essay she expresses the idea that if blacks become literate, then whites will see that they are intelligent and that they, the blacks, will be trea

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1468
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)