Progress: Reform
A New Moral Sensibility
Reform
Such great strides were made in the sciences that Enlightenment thinkers held out great hope that progress could be made in human affairs. The same models that applied in physics could be applied to people. That once the old ignorance and superstition that enslaved or held people down were removed that true social progress could be achieved.
The impulses that led to the American Revolution and the French Revolution were born out of Enlightenment thought. A generation later a strong movement toward social and moral reform emerged in Great Britain and the United States. It was born, curiously, out of a pre-Enlightenment movement - religion.
Beginning around 1801, especially strong in Britain and the United States was a social reform movement. This movement involved a number of trends. It grew, in part, out of the Enlightenment idea of Progress. Things did not have to remain the same. Using Enlightenment principles individual people, groups, classes and countries could "improve" themselves.
Religion further strengthened the reform impulse. Almost all the leading reformers were devoutly religious men and women who wanted to deepen the nation's commitment to Christian principles. Two trends in religious thought—religious liberalism and evangelical revivalism—strengthened reformers' zeal.
What was Religious Liberalism?
Religious liberalism was an emerging form of humanitarianism in protestant religion that rejected the harsh Calvinist (1509–64) doctrines of original sin and predestination (represented by Puritanism in England and the US, Presbyterianism in Scotland).
Religious liberalism's preachers stressed the basic goodness of human nature and each individual's capacity to follow the example of Christ.
William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was America's leading exponent of religious liberalism, and his beliefs, proclaimed in a sermon he delivered in Baltimore in 1819, became the basis for American Unitarianism.
The new religious denomination stressed individual freedom of belief, a united world under a single God, and the mortal nature of Jesus Christ, whom individuals should strive to emulate.
Channing's beliefs stimulated many reformers to work toward improving the conditions of the physically handicapped, the criminal, the impoverished, and the enslaved.
The Second Great Awakening
An amazing event took place at Cane Ridge, Kentucky in August 1801
Enthusiastic religious revivals swept the US in the early nineteenth century, providing further religious motivation for the reform impulse. On August 6, 1801, some 25,000 men, women, and children gathered in the small frontier community of Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in search of religious salvation.
Twenty-five thousand was a fantastically large number of people at a time when the population of the whole state of Kentucky was a quarter million, and the state's largest city, Lexington, had only 1795 residents.
The Cane Ridge camp meeting went on for a week. Baptists, Methodists, and ministers of other denominations joined together to preach to the vast throng.
Within three years, similar revivals occurred throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio. This great wave of religious fervor became known as the Second Great Awakening (see religious revival).
The revivals inspired a widespread sense that the nation was standing close to the millennium, a thousand years of peace and benevolence when sin, war, and tyranny would vanish from the earth.
Evangelical leaders urged their followers to reject selfishness and materialism and repent their sins. To the revivalists, sin was no metaphysical abstraction. Luxury, high living, indifference to religion, preoccupation with worldly and commercial matters—all were denounced as sinful. If men and women did not seek God through Christ, the nation would face divine retribution. Evangelical revivals helped instill in Americans a belief that they had been chosen by God to lead the world toward "a millennium of republicanism."
Where did revivals have their greatest appeal? Who was most strongly attracted to revivals?
Revival meetings attracted both frontier settlers and city folk, slaves and masters, farmers and shopkeepers.
The revivals had their greatest appeal among isolated farming families on the western and southern frontier and among upwardly mobile merchants, shopkeepers, artisans, skilled laborers in the expanding commercial and industrial towns of the North. They also drew support from social conservatives who feared that America would disintegrate into a state of anarchy without the influence of evangelical religion.
Above all, revivals attracted large numbers of young women, who took an active role organizing meetings, establishing church societies, and editing religious publications.
Religious Diversity
What is Deism?
During the late eighteenth century, church membership was low and falling. Deism—a movement that emphasized reason rather than revelation and denied that a divine creator interfered with the workings of the universe—and skepticism (a doubt in the knowability or truth of religion) seemed to be spreading. Religious folk were worried and felt that the old religion needed to be renewed.
Religious revivals played a critical role in this outpouring of religious feeling.
Revivalism also represented a response to the growing separation of church and state that followed the American Revolution. When states deprived established churches of state support (as did Virginia in 1785, Connecticut in 1818, and Massachusetts in 1833), Protestant ministers held revivals to ensure that America would remain a God-fearing nation.
The popularity of revivals also reflected the hunger of many Americans for an emotional religion that downplayed creeds and rituals and instead emphasized conversion.
Despite the strength of the zeal of Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism was the largest and fastest growing Christian denomination in the US during the pre-Civil War era.
From just 25,000 members and 6 priests in 1776, the Catholic church in America grew to 3 million members in 1860. With English, French, German, Irish, and Mexican members, it was not only the nation's largest denomination it was also the most ethnically diverse.
What led to the formation of African American churches?
Prejudice and discrimination led African Americans to create their own churches. The first were established in Philadelphia, after the city's black Methodists were ordered to sit in a segregated gallery. Between 1804 and 1815, African Americans formed their own Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches in eastern cities. In 1816, the African Methodist Episcopal church, the first autonomous black denomination, was founded.
Jews faced less discrimination and hostility than Catholics, in part because the Jewish community was scattered and, in part. because most Jews shed the distinctive dress, long sideburns, and other customs that set European Jews apart from their contemporaries.
Moral Reform
One of the most dramatic attempts at moral reform involved Magdalene societies, which sought in the 1830s and 1840s to rehabilitate prostitutes and discourage male solicitation. The New York Moral Reform Society had 15,000 members in 1837 and had branches in New England and upstate New York.
Members walked into brothels and prayed for the prostitutes, publicized in the newspapers the names of men who patronized prostitutes, visited prostitutes in jails, and lobbied for state laws that would make male solicitation of prostitutes a crime.
Abolition: the most extensive moral reform campaign
The most extensive moral reform campaign, however, was that against drinking, which was an integral part of American life. Many people believed that downing a glass of whiskey before breakfast was conducive to good health.
Instead of taking coffee breaks, people took a dram of liquor at 11 and again at 4 o'clock as well as drinks after meals "to aid digestion" and a nightcap before going to sleep.
Campaigning politicians offered voters generous amounts of liquor during campaigns and as rewards for "right voting" on election day. On the frontier, one evangelist noted, "a house could not be raised, a field of wheat cut down, nor could there be a log rolling, a husking, a quilting, a wedding, or a funeral without the aid of alcohol."
Easily affordable to even the poorest Americans—a gallon of whiskey cost 25 cents in the 1820s—consumption had risen markedly since the beginning of the century. The supply of alcohol increased as farmers distilled growing amounts of corn into cheap whiskey, which could be transported more easily than bulk corn. By 1820 the typical adult American consumed more than 7 gallons of absolute alcohol a year (compared to 2.6 gallons today).
Reformers sought to alter the cultural norms that encouraged alcohol consumption by identifying liquor as the cause of a wide range of social, family, and personal problems.
Many middle-class women blamed alcohol for the abuse of wives and children and the squandering of family resources. Many businesspeople identified drinking with crime, poverty, and inefficient and unproductive employees.
The stage was set for the appearance of an organized movement against liquor. In 1826 the US's first formal national temperance organization—the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance—was born.
Led by socially prominent clergy and laypeople, the new organization called for total abstinence from distilled liquor. Within 3 years, 222 state and local antiliquor groups were laboring to spread this message.
By 1835 an estimated 2 million Americans had taken the "pledge" to abstain from hard liquor. Temperance reform drew support from many southerners and westerners who were otherwise indifferent or hostile to reform. Their efforts helped reduce annual per capita consumption of alcohol from 7 gallons in 1830 to 3 gallons a decade later, forcing 4000 distilleries to close.
Two new approaches to temperance took place in the 1840s
Two new approaches to the temperance movement arose during the 1840s. The first was the Washingtonian movement in which reformed alcoholics sought to reform other drinkers. As many as 600,000 drinkers took the Washingtonian pledge of total abstinence.
The second approach was a campaign to restrict the manufacture and sale of alcohol, culminating in adoption of the nation's first statewide prohibition law in Maine in 1851, which led to prohibition laws often being referred to as "Maine laws."
Convinced that moral suasion was ineffective, a minister argued strongly in behalf of prohibition laws: "You might almost as well persuade the chained maniac to leave off howling, as to persuade him to leave off drinking."
Social Reform
The nation's first reformers tried to improve the nation's moral and spiritual values by distributing Bibles and religious tracts, promoting observance of the Sabbath, and curbing drinking.
Beginning in the 1820s a new phase of reform—social reform—spread across the country, directed at crime, illiteracy, poverty, and disease.
Reformers sought to solve these social problems by creating new institutions—including prisons, public schools, and asylums for the deaf, the blind, and the mentally ill.
The Problem of Crime in a Free Society
Compare the attitude toward crime in pre Revolution America with that of the reform period of pre Civil War America.
Before the American Revolution, punishment for crimes generally involved some form of corporal punishment, ranging from the death penalty for serious crimes to public whipping, confinement in stocks, and branding for lesser offenses.
Jails were used as temporary confinement for criminal defendants awaiting trial or punishment.
Conditions in these early jails were horrible. Cramped cells held large groups of offenders of both sexes and all ages; debtors were confined with hardened criminals. Prisoners customarily had to pay the expenses of food and lodging.
During the pre-Civil War decades reformers began to view crime as a social problem—a product of environment and parental neglect—rather than the result of original sin or innate human depravity.
Reformers believed it was the duty of a humane society to remove the underlying causes of crime, to sympathize and show patience toward criminals and to try to reform them, instead of whipping or confining them in stocks.
Reform of the Debt System
Imprisonment for debt also came under attack. As late as 1816, an average of 600 residents of New York City were in prison at any one time for failure to pay debts. More than half owed less than $50. New York's debtor prisons provided no food, furniture, or fuel for their inmates, who would have starved without the assistance of relatives or the charity of humane societies. In a Vermont case, state courts imprisoned a man for a debt of just 54 cents, and in Boston a woman was taken from her three children as a result of a $3 debt.
Increasingly, reformers regarded imprisonment for debt as irrational, since imprisoned debtors were unable to work and pay off their debts. Piecemeal reform led to the abolition of debtor prisons, as states eliminated the practice of jailing people for trifling debts, and then forbade the jailing of women and veterans.
The Struggle for Public Schools
Of all the ideas advanced by antebellum reformers, none was more original than the principle that all American children should be educated to their full capacity at public expense.
Reformers viewed education as the key to individual opportunity and the creation of an enlightened and responsible citizenry. Reformers also believed that public schooling could be an effective weapon in the fight against juvenile crime and an essential ingredient in the education and assimilation of immigrants.
During the seventeenth century, the New England Puritans required every town to establish a public school supported by fees from all but the very poorest families
Horace Mann led the fight for government support for public schools all across America in the 19th C.
In this spirit of
reform, a Quaker school- teacher, Prudence Crandall, attempted to teach free black children
in her school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in 1832.
In 1832, Prudence Crandall, a Quaker school- teacher in Canterbury, Connecticut, sparked a major controversy by admitting Sarah Harris, the daughter of a free black farmer, into her school.
After white parents withdrew their children from the school, the young schoolteacher tried to turn her school into an institution for the education of free blacks.
Hostile neighbors broke the school's windows, contaminated its well with manure, and denied its students seats on stagecoaches and in pews in church.
In 1833, after the state adopted a law making it a crime to teach black students who were not residents of Connecticut, state authorities arrested Crandall. She was tried twice, convicted, and jailed. After her release, a local mob attacked Crandall's school building with crowbars and attempted to burn the structure. It never opened again.
Other Discrimination in education.
Women and religious "minorities" also experienced discrimination.
For women, education beyond the level of handicrafts and basic reading and writing was largely confined to separate female academies and seminaries for the affluent.
Emma Hart Willard opened one of the first academies offering an advanced education to women in Philadelphia in 1814.
Many public school teachers showed an anti-Catholic bias by using texts that portrayed the Catholic church as a threat to republican values and reading passages from a Protestant version of the Bible.
Beginning in New York City in 1840, Catholics decided to establish their own system of schools in which children would receive a religious education as well as training in the arts and sciences.
Co-ed colleges
In higher education a few institutions opened their doors to African Americans and women. In 1833 Oberlin College became the nation's first co-educational college.
Four years later, Mary Lyon established the first women's college, Mount Holyoke, to train teachers and missionaries. A number of western state universities also admitted women.
In addition, three colleges for African Americans were founded before the Civil War, and a few other colleges, including Oberlin, Harvard, Bowdoin, and Dartmouth, admitted small numbers of black students.
Asylums for Society's Outcasts
A number of reformers devoted their attention to the problems of the mentally ill, the deaf, and the blind.
In 1841, Dorothea Dix (1802-1887), a 39-year-old former schoolteacher, volunteered to give religious instruction to women incarcerated in the East Cambridge, Massachusetts, House of Correction.
Inside the House of Correction, she was horrified to find mentally ill inmates dressed in rags and confined to a single dreary, unheated room. Shocked by what she saw, she embarked on a lifelong crusade to reform the treatment of the mentally ill.
After a two-year secret investigation of every jail and almshouse in Massachusetts, Dix issued a report to the state legislature. The mentally ill, she found, were mixed indiscriminately with paupers and hardened criminals. Many were confined "in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods and lashed into obedience." Dix then carried her campaign for state-supported asylums nationwide, persuading more than a dozen state legislatures to improve institutional care for the insane.
Radical Reform
Three major thrusts of the reform movement
The initial thrust of reform—moral reform—was to rescue the nation from infidelity (to God) and intemperance (drinking, prostitution, etc.).
A second line of reform, social or humanitarian reform, attempted to alleviate such sources of human misery as crime, cruelty, disease, and ignorance.
Additionally, a third line of reform, radical reform, sought national regeneration by eliminating slavery and racial and sexual discrimination.
Early Antislavery Efforts
Both the United States and Britain in 1808 outlawed the African slave trade. (Though slavery itself was legal in the US until the Civil War and even during the war Lincoln only declared it illegal in the rebellious states of the Confederacy)
American colonization Society
A widespread belief that blacks and whites could not coexist and that racial separation was necessary encouraged futile efforts at deportation and overseas colonization.
In 1817 a group of prominent ministers and politicians formed the American Colonization Society to resettle free blacks in West Africa, encourage planters voluntarily to emancipate their slaves, and create a group of black missionaries who would spread Christianity in Africa. During the 1820s, Congress helped fund the cost of transporting free blacks to Africa.
A few blacks supported African colonization in the belief that it provided the only alternative to continued degradation and discrimination.
Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), a Quaker sea captain who was the son of a former slave and an Indian woman, led the first experiment in colonization. In 1815 he transported 38 free blacks to the British colony of Sierra Leone, on the western coast of Africa, and devoted thousands of his own dollars to the cause of colonization. In 1822 the American Colonization Society established the colony of Liberia, in west Africa, for resettlement of free American blacks.
It soon became apparent that colonization was a wholly impractical solution to the nation's slavery problem. Each year the nation's slave population rose by roughly 50,000, but in 1830 the American Colonization Society succeeded in persuading only 259 free blacks to migrate to Liberia, bringing the total number of blacks colonized in Africa to a mere 1400.
The Rise of Abolitionist Sentiment in the North
Initially, free blacks led the movement condemning colonization and northern discrimination against African Americans. As early as 1817, more than 3000 members of Philadelphia's black community staged a protest against colonization, at which they denounced the policy as "little more merciful than death."
In 1829 David Walker (1785-1830), the free black owner of a second-hand clothing store in Boston, issued the militant Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. The appeal threatened insurrection and violence if calls for the abolition of slavery and improved conditions for free blacks were ignored.
Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble,
to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular,
and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America,
Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829.
was one of the most radical documents of black protest
ever published. In this document, which was first printed and distributed in 1829, David Walker
analyzed slavery as the manifestation of the larger American evil of racism. It was also a call to
action for Africans and their descendants in America.
Walker believed in a just God who would bring judgment upon America unless dramatic changes were
made; he also believed that Christianity and education would serve as the foundation of black
struggle. Walker said that Bishop Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal
Church, "has done more in a spiritual sense for his ignorant and wretched brethren than any
other man of colour has, since the world began."
The next year, some 40 black delegates from 8 states held the first of a series of annual conventions denouncing slavery and calling for an end to discriminatory laws in the northern states.
Abolitionist Arguments and Public Reaction
The idea of abolition received impetus from William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879). In 1829 the 25-year-old white Bostonian added his voice to the outcry against colonization, denouncing it as a cruel hoax designed to promote the racial purity of the northern population while doing nothing to end slavery in the South.
Instead, he called for "immediate emancipation." By immediate emancipation, he meant the immediate and unconditional release of slaves from bondage without compensation to slaveowners.
In 1831, Garrison founded The Liberator, a militant abolitionist newspaper that was the country's first publication to demand an immediate end to slavery. On the front page of the first issue, he defiantly declared: "I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD." Incensed by Garrison's proclamation, the state of Georgia offered a $5000 reward to anyone who brought him to the state for trial.
Within 4 years, 200 antislavery societies had appeared in the North. In a massive propaganda campaign to proclaim the sinfulness of slavery, they distributed a million pieces of abolitionist literature and sent 20,000 tracts directly to the South.
Abolitionists attacked slavery on several grounds. Slavery was illegal because it violated the principles of natural rights to life and liberty embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Justice, said Garrison, required that the nation "secure to the colored population . . . all the rights and privileges that belong to them as men and as Americans."
Slavery was sinful because slaveholders, in the words of abolitionist Theodore Weld, had usurped "the prerogative of God." Masters reduced a "God-like being" to a manipulable "THING." Slavery also encouraged sexual immorality and undermined the institutions of marriage and the family. Not only did slave masters sexually abuse and exploit slave women, abolitionists charged, but in some older southern states, such as Virginia and Maryland, they bred slaves for sale to the more recently settled parts of the Deep South.
Slavery was economically retrogressive, abolitionists argued, because slaves, motivated only by fear, did not exert themselves willingly. By depriving their labor force of any incentive for performing careful and diligent work, by barring slaves from acquiring and developing productive skills, planters hindered improvements in crop and soil management. Abolitionists also charged that slavery impeded the development of towns, canals, railroads, and schools.
What was the House of Representatives reaction to the abolition sentiments in the 1830s and 1840s
Antislavery agitation provoked a harsh public reaction in both the North and the South. The U.S. postmaster general refused to deliver antislavery tracts to the South. In each session of Congress between 1836 and 1844 the House of Representatives adopted gag rules allowing that body automatically to table resolutions or petitions concerning the abolition of slavery.
Who was the first martyr for the cause of abolition?
In 1837, the abolitionist movement acquired its first martyr when an anti-abolitionist mob in Alton, Illinois, murdered Reverend Elijah Lovejoy, editor of a militant abolitionist newspaper. Three times mobs destroyed Lovejoy's printing presses and attacked his house. When a fourth press arrived, Lovejoy armed himself and guarded the new press at the warehouse. The anti-abolitionist mob set fire to the warehouse, shot Lovejoy as he fled the building, and dragged his mutilated body through the town.
Division Within the Antislavery Movement
What was the Free Soil Party?
In 1848 antislavery Democrats and Whigs merged with the Liberty party to form the Free Soil party. Unlike the Liberty party, which was dedicated to the abolition of slavery and equal rights for African Americans, the Free Soil party narrowed its demands to the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the exclusion of slavery from the federal territories. The Free Soilers also wanted a homestead law to provide free land for western settlers, high tariffs to protect American industry, and federally sponsored internal improvements. Campaigning under the slogan "free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men," the new party polled 300,000 votes (or 10 percent) in the presidential election of 1848 and helped elect Whig candidate Zachary Taylor.
What was the Underground Railroad?
Northern blacks also had a pivotal role in the "underground railroad," which provided escape routes for southern slaves through the northern states and into Canada. African-American churches offered sanctuary to runaways
How did people like Harriet Tubman advance the cause of abolition?
Harriet Tubman, advanced abolitionism by publicizing the horrors of slavery. Their firsthand tales of whippings and separation from spouses and children combated the notion that slaves were contented under slavery and undermined belief in racial inferiority. Tubman risked her life by making 19 trips into slave territory to free as many as 300 slaves. Slaveholders posted a reward of $40,000 for the capture of the "Black Moses."
Who was the most famous black abolitionist?
Frederick Douglass was the most famous fugitive slave and black abolitionist. The son of a Maryland slave woman and an unknown white father, Douglass was separated from his mother and sent to work on a plantation when he was 6 years old. At the age of 20, in 1838, he escaped to the North using the papers of a free black sailor. In the North, Douglass became the first runaway slave to speak out against slavery. When many Northerners refused to believe that this eloquent orator could possibly have been a slave, he responded by writing an autobiography that identified his previous owners by name. Although he initially allied himself with William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass later started his own newspaper, The North Star, and supported political action against slavery.
How did fragmentation of the anti-slavery movement work to its advantage?
Over the long run, the fragmentation of the antislavery movement worked to the advantage of the cause. Henceforth, Northerners could support whichever form of antislavery best reflected their views. Moderates could vote for political candidates with abolitionist sentiments without being accused of radical Garrisonian views or of advocating violence for redress of grievances.
The Birth of Feminism
The women's rights movement was a major legacy of radical reform. At the outset of the century, women could not vote or hold office in any state, they had no access to higher education, and they were excluded from professional occupations. American law accepted the principle that a wife had no legal identity apart from her husband. She could not be sued, nor could she bring a legal suit; she could not make a contract, nor could she own property. She was not permitted to control her own wages or gain custody of her children in case of separation or divorce. Under many circumstances she was even deemed incapable of committing crimes.
Broad social and economic changes, such as the development of a market economy and a decline in the birthrate, opened employment opportunities for women. Instead of bearing children at two-year intervals after marriage, as was the general case throughout the colonial era, during the early nineteenth century women bore fewer children and ceased childbearing at younger ages. During these decades the first women's college was established, and some men's colleges first opened their doors to women students. More women were postponing marriage or not marrying at all; unmarried women gained new employment opportunities as "mill girls" and elementary school teachers; and a growing number of women achieved prominence as novelists, editors, teachers, and leaders of church and philanthropic societies.
Although there were many improvements in the status of women during the first half of the century, women still lacked political and economic status when compared with men. As the franchise was extended to larger and larger numbers of white males, including large groups of recent immigrants, the gap in political power between women and men widened. Even though women made up a core of supporters for many reform movements, men excluded them from positions of decision making and relegated them to separate female auxiliaries. Additionally, women lost economic status as production shifted away from the household to the factory and workshop. During the late eighteenth century, the need for a cash income led women and older children to engage in a variety of household industries, such as weaving and spinning. Increasingly, in the nineteenth century, these tasks were performed in factories and mills, where the workforce was largely male.
The fact that changes in the economy tended to confine women to a sphere separate from men had important implications for reform. Since women were believed to be uncontaminated by the competitive struggle for wealth and power, many argued that they had a duty—and the capacity—to exert an uplifting moral influence on American society.
Name several women who began to forge new opportunities for women:
Catharine Beecher (1800-1878)
and Sarah J. Hale (1788-1879)
helped lead the effort to expand women's roles through moral influence.
Frances Wright (1795-1852), a Scottish-born reformer and lecturer, received the nickname "The Great Red Harlot of Infidelity" because of her radical ideas about birth control, liberalized divorce laws, and legal rights for married women.
In 1849 Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910) became the first American woman to receive a degree in medicine.
Catalyst for Women's Rights
40. What were the Grimké sisters the first to do?
A public debate over the proper role of women in the antislavery movement, especially their right to lecture to audiences composed of both sexes, led to the first organized movement for women's rights. By the mid-1830s more than a hundred female antislavery societies had been created, and women abolitionists were circulating petitions, editing abolitionist tracts, and organizing antislavery conventions. A key question was whether women abolitionists would be permitted to lecture to "mixed" audiences of men and women. In 1837 a national women's antislavery convention resolved that women should overcome this taboo: "The time has come for women to move in that sphere which providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied with the circumscribed limits which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her."
Angelina Grimké (1805-1879) and her sister Sarah (1792-1873)—two sisters from a wealthy Charleston, South Carolina, slaveholding family—were the first women to break the restrictions and widen women's sphere through their writings and lectures before mixed audiences.
In 1837 Angelina gained national notoriety by lecturing against slavery to audiences that included men as well as women. Shocked by this breach of the separate sexual spheres ordained by God, ministers in Massachusetts called on their fellow clergy to forbid women the right to speak from church pulpits.
Sarah Grimké in 1840 responded with a pamphlet entitled Letters on the Condition of Women and the Equality of the Sexes, one of the first modern statements of feminist principles. She denounced the injustice of lower pay and denial of equal educational opportunities for women. Her pamphlet expressed outrage that women were "regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure" and were taught to believe that marriage is "the sine qua non [indispensable element] of human happiness and human existence." Men and women, she concluded, should not be treated differently, since both were endowed with innate natural rights.
41. Who organized the first women’s rights convention in history?
Lucretia Mott (1793-1880), who earlier had been denied the right to serve as a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention,
and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
organized the first women's rights convention in history.
Held in July 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, the convention drew up a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, which opened with the phrase "All men and women are created equal."
It named 15 specific inequities suffered by women, and after detailing "a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of men toward woman," the document concluded that "he has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."
Among the resolutions adopted by the convention, only one was not ratified unanimously—that women be granted the right to vote.
Women's Rights: Seneca Falls Declaration and Resolutions (1848)
At the first convention in history dedicated to equal rights for women, held in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, the delegates adopted a "Declaration of Sentiments." Drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and modeled on the Declaration of Independence, it listed a series of injuries that women had suffered at the hands of men and declared that women and men shared the same inalienable rights.
Declaration of Sentiments
We hold these truth to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal. . . .
The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners.
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has opposed her on all sides.
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.
He has taken from her all rights in property, even to the wages she earns.
He has made her, morally, an irresponsible being, as she can commit many crimes with impunity, provided they be done in the presence of her husband. In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.
He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes, and in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women—the law, in all cases, going into a false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands.
After depriving her of all rights as a married woman, if single, and the owner of property, he has taxed her to support a government which recognizes her only when her property can be made profitable to it.
He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration. He closes against her all avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is not known. . . .
He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.
Source: Seneca Falls Declaration and Resolutions, 1848, in Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., History of Woman Suffrage (Rochester, 1889), 1: 75-80.
What successes could the women’s movement claim by 1860?
By midcentury women's rights conventions had been held in every northern state.
Despite ridicule from the public press—the Worcester (Massachusetts) Telegraph denounced women's rights advocates as "Amazons"—female reformers contributed to important, if limited, advances against discrimination.
They succeeded in gaining adoption of Married Women's Property Laws in a number of states, granting married women full control over their own income and property.
A New York law passed in 1860 gave women joint custody over children and the right to sue and be sued, and in several states women's rights reformers secured adoption of permissive divorce laws.
A Connecticut law, for example, granted divorce for any "misconduct" that "permanently destroys the happiness of the petitioner and defeats the purposes of the marriage relationship."