CH_12_an age of reform

AN AGE OF REFORM

Chapter 12

Utopian Communities (about 1840)

Reform Communities – Overview•Roughly 100 reform and/or Utopian communities were established before the Civil War•Goals of these communities:

• Reorganize society on a cooperative basis• Restore social harmony• Believed that the world exhibited too much individualism• Narrow the gap between the rich and poor• A backlash to growing industrialization• Socialism and Communism become ideas that work their

way into these communities’ beliefs•Groups

• Temperance Movement• Shakers• Transcendentalists• Oneida• Owenites

Temperance Movement Propaganda

The Temperance Movement•American Temperance Society – founded in 1826

• Efforts to redeem habitual drunkards

• By 1830, it claimed to have redeemed hundreds of thousands of American drunkards

•“Washingtonians” – group of men who quit drinking alcohol and convinced others to follow suit•The Temperance Movement eventually gains hundreds of thousands of followers and leads to the Prohibition Movement in the 1900s•Became a badge of respectability to the Northern middle class•Opponents saw this as an attack on freedom (Catholics)

Shakers

The Shakers•Most successful of the religious reform communities

• Had close to 5,000 members in the 1840s• Settlements from Maine to Kentucky

•Had a significant impact on those outside their community•Very successful economically•Believed that men and women were spiritually equal

• God had a “dual personality”•Abandoned private property and traditional family life•Also took an oath of celibacy

•Men and women lived in separate dormitories•Ate in communal dining halls•Got the name “Shakers” by their frenzied dancing, always separated by sexes

Immanuel Kant and Transcendentalism•American transcendentalism is rooted in Kant’s philosophy and German idealism•Seen as an alternative to Locke and the Unitarian church of the Revolutionary era

•Kant, “all knowledge transcendental which is concerned not with objects but with our mode of knowing objects”

•Key Principle:• Defining experience based on the

inner, spiritual, or mental essence of the human

•Sort of a backlash to rational thinking, the rise of urbanization, and growth of industry

Transcendentalism in the United States•Americans unfamiliar with strict German philosophy, relied primarily on English and French commentators

• Thomas Carlyle• Samuel Taylor Coleridge• Victor Cousin

•Very familiar with English Romanticism (partially why we later see the outgrowth of Romanticism in the United States)•Transcendental Club

• Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 8 September 1936• Published The Dial• “Transcendentalists” was originally a pejorative term, suggesting their

position was beyond sanity and reason

•Became a group of new ideas in religion, literature, culture, and philosophy until the late 1850s

• Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature• Henry David Thoreau, Walden

•American transcendentalist principle:• “ideal spiritual state that ‘transcends’ the physical and empirical and is

only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions”

Oneida Community•Founder, John Noyes•Preached that he and his followers had become so perfect that they had achieved “sinlessness”•Abandoned private property, traditional marriage, and lived in a dictatorial community in New York

Owenites•Robert Owen, most important secular communitarian•Owen promoted communitarianism as a peaceful means for ensuring workers received the wages they deserved•Women’s rights and education were very important to this community

Abolitionism in the United States

Black Abolitionists• Played a leading role in the anti-slavery movement• Frederick Douglass

• Wrote a bestselling autobiography about his life as a slave

• Met with President Lincoln during the Civil• Advocate for emancipation, women’s suffrage,

and civil rights• Harriet Beecher Stowe – Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Gave the abolitionist movement a very human appeal; based on the life of a fugitive slave named Josiah Henson

Abolitionism and Race•The movement was integrated, but whites attempted to place blacks in secondary positions•Launched legal and political battles against slavery in the South•Blacks developed a unique understand of freedom beyond their white allies•Often attacked the intellectual foundation of slavery

Abolitionism in the United States

Reactions to Abolitionism•Northerners

• Some attacked abolitionists because they felt it threatened the solidarity of the Union

• Interfering with profits in manufacturing that relied on slave labor for raw materials

• Afraid of overturning white supremacy

•Southerners• Afraid of overturning an economic system• Afraid of overturning a way of life• Afraid of overturning white supremacy

•Mob attacks against abolitionists convinced many northerners that abolition was incompatible with the democracy ideals of the U.S. (specifically white males)

•The point of contention for abolitionists became a battle over the right to debate slavery openly without fear of violence

• Became known as the “gospel of freedom”

Abolitionism in the United States

Forms of Abolitionism•Colonization

• American Colonization Society• Gradual abolition of slavery and settlement of black Americans in Africa• Similar to Indian removal; America is based on a white society• Black Americans adamantly opposed this

• Insisted they were Americans too• President Lincoln proposes this during the Civil War

•Militant Abolitionism• Demanded immediate abolition• Believed that slavery was sinful and a violation of the Declaration of

Independence• However, most were pacifists and rejected violence• Most were just trying to convince slave owners to give up their slaves

The Origins of Feminism

Origins of Feminism

Women in the Public Sphere•Became instrumental to the abolition movement•Feminism became an international movement in the 1840s•The public sphere was open in ways government and party politics were not•Women lectured in public about abolition

• Grimke sisters• Frances Wright• Maria Stewart

•Grimke sisters argued that women should be involved in:• Assemblies• Lectures• Demonstrations

Women’s Rights•Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucreita Mott organize the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848

• Raised the issue of women’s suffrage for the first time• Rejected the idea of women’s sphere being in the home

•Declaration of Sentiments• Condemned the structure of inequality for women in America

•This movement posed a fundamental challenge to society’s central beliefs

Origins of Feminism

Feminism’s connection with Abolitionism

The Slavery of Sex•This concept empowered women to challenge male authority and their own subordination•Marriage and slavery became a powerful tool for feminists

Social Freedom•Women should enjoy the rights to:

• Regulate their sexual activity• Protection from violence from their

husbands• Individual rights• Broaden their rights outside the home

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Women’s Emancipation