Gordon , eds. Anthony , 6 vols. Anthony quoted in Ann D. Anthony , by Susan B. Nancy F. Blocker Jr. Norton, Jean H. Pamela S. Alison M. Parker , eds. Reva B. Stanton , History of Woman Suffrage — , includes a cumulative index at the end of vol. Anthony , 3 vols. Anthony , vol. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice.
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The Upshot After the Civil War transformed the landscape of human rights in the United States by sweeping away slavery, Reconstruction-era politicians put in place new constitutional amendments that defined citizenship and appeared to guarantee rights, culminating with the 15th Amendment, which specifically extended the right to vote to black men.
Further Reading Baker, Jean H. New York: Oxford University Press, DuBois, Ellen Carol. Dudden, Faye E. Flexner, Eleanor. Ginzberg, Lori D. New York: Hill and Wang, Gordon, Ann D. African American Women and the Vote, — Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, Hewitt, Nancy A. Hoffert, Sylvia D. On the secular side was a new faith in human reason and its power to remake the world, a faith manifested in the American and French revolutions.
Antebellum reform also drew heavily on an early nineteenth-century wave of Protestant revivalism, often called the Second Great Awakening. In complicated ways this form of evangelical Christianity encouraged some believers not all to engage in reform movements. Religion, nonetheless, gave antebellum reform its moral urgency, just as secular languages of reason and rights also molded it. Economic, demographic, and technological changes likewise inspired and shaped antebellum reform. Although America remained predominately a rural and small-town nation into the twentieth century, its cities were growing after Urban areas provided some of the problems reformers addressed, but they and small towns also had the critical mass of people and resources reform organizations required.
Urban growth and an expanding economy, moreover, produced a new middle class with a level of financial comfort and leisure time necessary to engage in reform. Among its members were educated women denied much of a public voice except in religious and reform activities. They were the backbone of many causes. Finally, by the s improvements in printing technology and in transportation—notably canals, steamboats, and eventually railroads—made it far less expensive for reformers and their messages to circulate over wider distances.
Antebellum reform propaganda aimed broadly at public opinion, not just elites, and used new media in ways that look modern. Before the Civil War, however, it meant persuading people to do the right thing. Behind it was something of a religious conversion model of reform: change begins, and proceeds, one person at a time.
Another notion of how to implement reform relied on coercion, not just persuasion—legislation, social pressure, or incarceration in corrective institutions, for example. In , abolitionists split over several issues, among them whether to engage in partisan politics or stick to moral suasion. At about the same time some temperance advocates similarly moved from encouraging abstinence from alcohol to using state legislators to ban it.
Between the Revolution and the Civil War more than a hundred of these small utopian communities materialized, some religious in origin, some based on secular ideologies. Because the evangelical movement prominently positioned women as the guardians of moral virtue, however, many middle-class women parlayed this spiritual obligation into a more public role. Although prohibited from participating in formal politics such as voting, office holding, and making the laws that governed them, white women entered the public arena through their activism in charitable and reform organizations.
As antebellum reform and revivalism brought women into the public sphere more than ever before, women and their male allies became more attentive to the myriad forms of gender inequity in the United States. Female education provides an example of the great strides made by and for women during the antebellum period. In , Emma Willard founded the Middlebury Female Seminary with the explicit purpose of educating girls with the same rigorous curriculum used for boys of the same age.
It was not until that she could drum up enough private contributions to finance the opening of her Troy Female Seminary now called Emma Willard School. Lyons and Willard specifically targeted the wealthy middle-class, but their work nonetheless opened doors for women that previously had remained closed. In the s, women in cities like Boston, New York, and Philadelphia established female societies dedicated to the antislavery mission.
They discovered, however, a paradox at the heart of this effort—autonomous people were wayward and often needed to be coerced into egalitarian reform, which meant that a larger authority, such as the State, needed to negate individual autonomy in order to bring about an egalitarian society. Such has been the paradox at the heart of socialism ever since. Historians have often focused on the antebellum period as the "era of reform" in America, culminating in the anti-slavery crusade of the Civil War, but it is also true that did not mark the end of the reform movement, but initiated a period that persists until today in which reformers, seemingly vindicated by the end of slavery as a result of the war, shifted their thinking so as to focus on the secular State, particularly the federal government, as the main instrument for reforming society along Progressive lines.
Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, , revised edition. New York: Hill and Wang, Steven L.
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