American History

American History

Answer # 1: The Two Movements

Women's Rights Movement

In the antebellum United States, a woman's status and rights depended on the law, economics, culture, custom, education, ethnicity, and race. Lauded by reformers such as Catharine Beecher, teaching was considered an extension of motherhood and therefore a fitting profession for women to enter. The earliest changes in a woman's legal status also relied on the rhetoric of motherhood. The married women's property acts of the 1839, allowed women to regain control of their property after marriage in order to protect them against their husbands' debts (Tindall, 2009). In 1836, Angelina Grimké wrote An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in which she argued that southern women had a particular responsibility to sway their husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons to the abolition movement. In 1848, a women's rights convention was held at Seneca Falls, New York under the presidency of Quaker minister Lucretia Mott and reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton; it gathered 300 men and women who believed that women's rights needed direct and urgent redress. The participants at the convention debated and signed “The Declaration of Sentiments”. It steeped in Revolutionary War ideology, demanded no less than a social, political, and economic revolution on behalf of women (Tindall, 2009).

Temperance movement

The temperance movement was a reaction to a national trend toward increased alcohol consumption at the beginning of the 19th century. The temperance movement aimed to eradicate the use of alcoholic beverages throughout American society. In 1826, the American Society for the Promotion of Temperance was born. This group later changed its name to the American Temperance Society (ATS). Founded by evangelical minister, the ATS used the same tactics to spread the gospel of abstinence from distilled spirits. In the 1840s temperance experienced a minor revival at the hands of activists called the Washingtonians (Tindall, 2009). Their efforts to redeem inebriates used the testimony of former drunkards in gatherings akin to revival meetings of the Second Great Awakening. Women were also invited to join Martha Washington societies to help husbands and sons abstain from alcohol. Prohibition activity continued throughout the 1840s, until the landmark passage of the Maine Law in 1851 banning the manufacture of liquor and restricting its sale to agents of the state for medicinal and industrial users. This groundswell of public opposition, combined with growing sectional strife and the approaching Civil War, caused the temperance movement to founder. Its revival did not take place until the formation of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in the 1870s. (Tindall, 2009)

Answer # 2: Presidency of James K. Polk

James Knox Polk was the 11th president of the United States. The four objectives of James K. Polk were the acquisition of California, the reduction of the tariff, the settlement of the Oregon question and the establishment of the independent treasury. As president, Polk succeeded against Whig opposition to enlarge the United States by not only acquiring Texas and Oregon but also California. Relations with Mexico were also strained by Polk's interest in ...