Parenting & Family Quote by Angelina Grimke

Grimke hands you a quiet provocation dressed up as faith in the future: “I trust the time is coming” sounds gentle, but it’s a demand. She’s not merely complimenting teachers; she’s indicting a society that treats the shaping of minds as low-status labor while reserving “honor” for people who command money, property, pulpits, and political office. The line works because it flips the moral hierarchy. If your culture claims to value virtue, democracy, and progress, then the people who build citizens should sit at the top of the prestige ladder. The fact that they don’t is the point.

Calling it “the most honorable of human employment” is also strategically expansive. She doesn’t say “women’s work,” even though teaching was one of the few socially acceptable professions for women in the 19th century. She universalizes it, insisting that educating children isn’t a fallback job; it’s civilization’s core craft. That framing doubles as a feminist argument without announcing itself as one: if teaching is the highest calling, then women’s public labor is not only permissible, it’s essential.

Context sharpens the stakes. Grimke, an abolitionist and women’s rights activist who broke norms by speaking publicly, understood that the fight against slavery and patriarchy is upstream of childhood instruction: who gets taught, what gets taught, and who is allowed to teach. Her “trust” is optimism with teeth, a way of pressuring her audience to live up to their own professed ideals while quietly asking: what kind of nation undervalues the people raising its future conscience?