American History

American History

Question # 2

Evaluate the major reform movements in 19th century America. Which movements were the most and least successful? Why?

Though the 19century saw many reform movements but here two of them will be discussed.

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 ...