Revolt and Reform
Abolition & Feminism
1820 -1840
Study Guide Identification’s
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Benevolent Empire
Temperance Movement
Social Mother
Sarah Joseph Hale
Working Man’s Movement
Institutional Reforms
Abolition
William Lloyd Garrison
American Colonization
Society, 1817
American Anti Slavery
Society, 1833
Black Abolition
David Walker
Nat Turner’s Rebellion, 1831
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Seneca Fall’s Convention,
1848
Declaration of Sentiments
Study Guide Questions
• What Characterized the evolution of the Abolition
Movement?
• What role would did women play in the reform
movements that followed in the wake of the
Industrial Revolution?
• What characterized the evolution of women’s
reform?
Reform Movement
• The Benevolent Empire
– Voluntary church-affiliated reform organizations
– Eastern elites and families
– Impose moral discipline
• Religious/Christian Conversion would provide
order among the lower classes
Women’s Role in Reform, 1800
• Phase I: Reform activities represented an
extension of the domestic ideal promoted in
the Cult of Domesticity
• “Social Mother” & Moral Suasion
• 1797, the Society for the Relief of Poor
Widows with Small Children, New York
Temperance Movement
• American Temperance
Society
– Founded in Boston, 1826
by Upper-middle class
– Businessmen used ideas
to create a regimented
labor force
• Intemperance – the
greatest sin
– Crime, poverty, insanity,
broken families
Women’s Reform, 1820’s
• Widened public role of women
• Reinforced cultural stereotypes of women as
helpmates who deferred to males
• Middle class women
• Voluntary female groups
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Maternal associations
Sponsored revivals
Established Sunday schools
Distributed bibles and religious tracts
Women’s Role in Reform, 1830s
• Challenge male prerogatives
• Crusade against prostitution
– New York Female Moral Reform Society
– Sarah Joseph Hale - Boston Aid Society
» Rejected the benevolent tradition of distinguishing
between the “respectable” and the “unworthy”
» low wages and substandard housing that trapped her
poor clients in poverty
» Businessmen exploited female labor
• American Female Moral Reform Society
– Crusade against the sexual double standard
Prisons, Workhouses, Asylums
• 18th century belief that people could not be
rehabilitated, conditions could not be changed
• Reformers of the Jacksonian era believed peoples
environments shaped their character and could be
redeemed
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Penitentiaries
Mental hospitals
Workhouses
Orphanages
reformatories
School Reform
• Workingman’s Movement
– Eastern cities, 1820s
– Pushed for “equal republican education”
• Sought to guarantee that all citizens could achieve
meaningful liberty and equality
• First Board of Education, Massachusetts, 1837
– Wealthy property holders resisted
• Refused to pay taxes to support the education of
working class children
Abolition & Women’s rights
• Abolitionists
– insisted that slavery was THE great national sin and it
mocked ideals of liberty and Christian morality.
• 1840, Movement led by William Lloyd Garrison split
– Garrison’s division supported women’s rights
– Female abolitionists organized a separate women’s rights
movement.
American Colonization Society, 1817
• Founded by slave holding politicians from the
upper south such as Henry Clay, James
Madison and President James Monroe
• Gradual emancipation followed by the
removal of black people from America to
Africa
– Goal was to make America all free and all white.
Black Abolition
• A black petition in 1817 states that banishment from America
would “not only be cruel, but in direct violation of the
principles which have been the boast of this republic.”
• 1827 Freedom’s Journal
• David Walker, “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World,”
1829
– Rejected colonization
– Indictment of white greed and hypocrisy
– “America is more our country, than it is the whites, we have enriched
it with our blood and tears,” and he warned that “wo be to you if we
have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”
Nat Turner’s Rebellion exploded in 1831 and gave rise
to white abolitionists who rejected colonization
American Anti-Slavery Society, 1833
• Founded in 1833 by Black and White Abolitionists
• With financial backing spread the messages:
– Printed word
• Documented indictment of slaver,
• American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses
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Rallies
Paid lectures
Children’s games and toys
Sermons
Published sayings on posters, emblems, song sheets and candy
wrappers
Anti-slavery men
Anti- Abolition Movement
• Mid 1830s anti-abolitionist mobs in the north
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disrupted anti slavery meetings
beat and stoned speakers
destroyed the printing press
burned homes of wealthy benefactors
vandalized free black movements
• In the south
– burned and censored anti-slavery literature
– offered rewards for capturing leading abolitionists to stand trial for
inciting slave revolts
– tightened up slave codes and surveillance of free blacks.
– Democrats in congress passed a gag rule that automatically tabled
anti-slavery petitions
Women’s Rights Movement
• Feminism grew out of abolitionism
• Parallels between slaves & women
– Considered biologically inferior
– Denied the vote
– Deprived of property or control of wages after
marriage
– Barred from most occupations and advanced
occupations
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton called the First
National Convention devoted
to Women’s rights at Seneca
Fall, New York
Seneca Fall’s Convention, 1848
• Seneca Fall’s Convention defined goals of women’s
movement for the rest of the century
– Declaration of Sentiments
– full female equality
– identified male patriarchy as the source of women’s
oppression
– demanded the vote
• New York’s Married Women’s Property Act of 1860
– established women’s legal rights to their own wage income and to
sue fathers and husbands who tried to deprive them of their wages.