Antebellum Reformers example essay topic

The American History Series: Women in Antebellum Reform was written by Lori D. Ginzberg who focused her work on the battle women went through to obtain rights in their society. This book is broken up into five chapters with numerous subtopics to better inform the reader. Edited by John Hope Franklin of Duke University and A.S. Eisen stadt of Brooklyn College have also helped to bring this book together. "This is a soul-stirring era", remarked Reverend William Mitchell in 1835, "and will be so recorded in the annals of time" (p. 1). Numerous antebellum reformers agreed that the United States efforts to change, especially the northern and western regions, seemed hopeless. Women of the Protestant middle and upper classes played an important role with their influence in charity.

Their efforts to provide bibles and tracts, end drunkenness, abolish slavery, build orphan asylums and training schools, improve the moral and physical condition of prostitutes, establish utopian communities, transform Americans' practices of eating, healing, dressing, educating, and raising women's status were greatly affected both by emerging ideas about womanhood and by the women themselves. For many Americans, the changes occurring in society were simply too close to home. With the increase of literacy and access to print, stories about New York's disturbing murders, gangs, prostitution, and mob violence seemed to be front page news day after day. It was time for a change. While men were so caught up in who ran the country, women, vastly outnumbering men among church members, felt they determined the success of revivalists' actions.

Wives, daughters, and sisters accepted the role of cleaning and taking care of the household. These women were also every involved with charity work. It was very important to them and became a mission rather than a simple way to ease the suffering around the world. No social reform more dramatically captured the attention of the Protestant middle class than temperance.

Although many antebellum reformers argued that poverty was the result of immoral or undisciplined behavior on the part of the poor, the very existence of poverty was frightening. While drinking for them was less abstract, it came to symbolize all that was wrong and all that could go wrong with American families, cities, and society itself. Americans drank plenty whether on the job or in the tavern, they seemed to think that alcohol was cheaper than coffee and safer than water. Consuming about seven gallons of alcohol per year, more than twice the amount consumed today, alcohol was a part of life. By the middle of the nineteenth century, virtually every Protestant reform movement would include total abstinence from alcohol. Suddenly, alcohol was responsible for nearly every ill moral action.

Drinking came to symbolize the decline of society. Within ten years of the formation of the American Temperance Society, it had 5,000 local chapters with a total of about 100,000 members. It soon spread, expanding it's message to a wider middle class, becoming far more than a movement to control workers. Even politicians succumbed to its influence as one Indiana legislator's local temperance campaign was "The Bottle is no longer considered as a necessary part of the furniture of our rooms, and indeed so great is the change of public sentiment on the subject that few persons will keep a Bottle in public view" (p. 35). Women then found their way into an even wider field by undertaking the reform of state-controlled institutions. Middle-class women declared it their duty to intervene in public institutions, such as prisons, mental hospitals, and poorhouses that housed other females.

Prison reformers insisted upon and eventually obtained female matrons for prisons with advocates of industrial training educating girls in the skills of domestic labor. Also, reformers pointed out the mistreatment of women in various asylums for the insane and ill. In 1827, reformer and educator, Horace Mann helped to pass a Massachusetts law to place the "furiously mad" in "lunatic asylums" rather than prisons (p. 48). Four years later, the legislature appropriated $30,000 for a state hospital for the insane in Worcester.

By the decade's end, the Boston Lunatic Asylum was founded. The most dramatic successes were largely the result of the work of one woman, Dorothea Dix. She, through investigation, reporting, and lobbying, forced Americans to examine the neglect and cruelty that had constituted the care of the insane. For decades, women reformers had quietly expanded women's roles in a variety of moral causes. It was time for women to make even more inspiring changes. Held on July 19 and 20, 1848, the convention at Seneca Falls drew 300 people to the Wesleyan Chapel.

Men, who were invited on the second day, made up about one-third of the 100 people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments. Although, not all the demands made at Seneca Falls were subject to legal notations. The convention spoke of the harm done to women by the men's immoral behavior, the prohibition against their speaking in religious assemblies, and ministers' restrictions of their sphere of action. As Ginzberg describes it, "The Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments was a profoundly liberal, and Enlightenment, document" (p. 107). Women's equality required each woman to lift herself above the constraints that laws as well as generations of men, centuries of religious teachings, and their own complacency had imposed.

Lori D. Ginzberg's impressive information and facts of the journey for women's rights supplies the reader with an extensive understanding at this time in history. Overall, the content of this book is very straightforward and accurate. Women in Antebellum Reform offers an insightful view of the women's motives, ideologies, organized strategies, and moral principles as they fought their way to equality.