Women and Reform

Part one-women in the domestic sphere

 Women in Education

 Coverture

 Temperance-Bridge to Public Sphere

Beecher on Higher Education

 "Our country, then, is most abundantly supplied with endowed institutions which secure a liberal education...but are not the most responsible of all duties committed to the charge of a woman?"

 "And is it not important to endow institutions which shall make a superior education accessible to all classes-females, as for the other sex?"

 "The formation of habits of investigation, of correct reasoning...of accurate analysis is the primary object to be sought in preparing American women for their duties!"

Teaching as A Profession

 "There are hundreds of villages which need teachers and would support them if they were on the spot, which will never send for them. And there are hundreds of females, now unemployed, who would teach...if a proper place were provided to them."- Catharine Beecher

Coverture

 LEGAL DOCTRINE THAT A WOMAN'S PROPERTY BECAME HER HUSBANDS UPON MARRIAGE AND THAT HER EARNINGS BELONGED TO HIM. ONCE MARRIED, WOMEN COULD NOT OWN PROPERTY, INCUR THEIR OWN DEBTS, OR APPEAR IN COURT ON THEIR OWN BEHALF. 

Temperance

"Cold Water Soldiers on Parade," 1848-Library of Congress

“The Drunkard's Progress"  Currier and Ives, 1849

Temperance as a bridge to the public sphere

“ It is feared by some that this is to be a “Woman’s Rights concern;” and hence the question has been repeatedly asked, “Is that subject to be agitated at your meeting?” My answer has been, No! The question to be discussed is the all-absorbing one of Temperance."

 R. Ostrander-Wisconsin Women's Temperance Society

Daughters of temperance 

 "We feel that the cause we have espoused, is
a common cause, a cause in which you, with
us are deeply interested, and We would that some means were devised, by which our brothers & sons shall no longer be...allured from the right, by the corrupting influence...of wine & brandy those sure destroyers of mental and moral worth, and by which our Sisters and daughters may no longer be exposed to the Vile arts of the gentlemanly appearing gallant, but really half inebriated seducer."

Temperance rhetoric

 "Who of our sisters are there, who do not weep tears of pity over the fate of this fair victim of the liquor seller’s cruel business? Who does not feel the wish for power to hurl down both the drunkard and the drunkard maker, and restore to their true position and happiness those who are subjected to cruelty?"

The Lily (1849-1856

 "Some of the papers accuse me of mixing Women’s Rights with our Temperance, as though it was possible for woman to speak on Temperance and Intemperance without also speaking of Woman’s Rights...That woman has rights, we think that none will deny; that she has been cruelly wronged by the law sanctioned liquor traffic...Then why should we not talk of woman’s rights and Temperance together?"

 A. Bloomer 

Women in abolition 

 1838, Coin created for the American Anti-Slavery Society 

Philadelphia female anti-slavery society 

 The Forten family cofounded with 14 others (including Lucretia Mott)

 First interracial, woman led abolitionist society

women in the abolition movement

 "Freedom, what art thou?-nothing but a name.

 
No more, no more! Oh God, this cannot be;

 
Thou to thy children’s aid wilt surely flee:
In thine own time deliverance thou wilt give,

 
And bid us rise from slavery, and live."

 From The Slave Girl’s Address to Her Mother by Sarah Forten Purvis 

Grimke sisters

 "It is even a greater absurdity to suppose a man can be legally born a slave under our free Republican Government, than under the petty despotisms of barbarian Africa. If then, we have no right to enslave an African, surely we can have none to enslave an American; if a self-evident truth that all men everywhere and of every color are born equal, and have an inalienable right to liberty, then it is equally true that no man can be born a slave."

 "Pray over this subject. When you have entered into your closets, and shut to the doors, then pray to your father, who seeth in . secret, that he would open your eyes to see whether slavery is sinful, and if it is, that he would enable you to bear a faithful, open and unshrinking testimony against it."

Abolition and women's rights

 "Husbands are torn from their wives, children from their parents, while the air is filled with the shrieks and lamentations of the bereaved. Sometimes they are brought from a remote country; obliged to wander over mountains and through deserts; chained together in herds."

 

 

 Child would also pen A Brief History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations (1835)

 Similarly, Grimke writes Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition of Woman (1838)

Woman suffrage

 Seneca Falls Convention, Seneca Fall, NY 1848

Elizabeth cady stanton 

 "From the man of highest mental cultivation, to the most degraded wretch who staggers in the streets do we hear ridicule and coarse jests, freely bestowed upon those who dare assert that woman stands by the side of man—his equal, placed here by her God to enjoy with him the beautiful earth, which is her home as it is his—having the same sense of right and wrong and looking to the same Being for guidance and support." ECS-Speech at Seneca Falls 

Declaration of rights and sentiments 

 When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.

 We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal

 He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

 He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

 He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men - both natives and foreigners.

Sojourner truth

 Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

 That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Key TAke-aways

 Temperance and Suffrage causes will continue to and through the Progressive Era

 Temperance, Abolition, and Suffrage triangulated within the domestic and public spheres 

 Women moved within and among those spheres to advance causes

 As we turn to  enslavement and enslaver next week, women were a significant force in the abolitionist cause-partially because of their domestic roles and then because of their stepping into the public sphere

 Narratives like those of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, and William Wells Brown were crucial to advocating for the cause