Reform

I finished reading chapter 11, Religion and Reform, and it describes the transcendental movement, and now it makes sense why people didnt start believing the transcendental beliefs until the 1830s. Until Emerson started writing about his ideas, people didnt feel the need for a social change, at least thats what I thought when reading about the industrial revolution until reforms started happening later. Most of the people who didnt see a need for a social change seemed to be upper class, white men, and this could be because they had all the power and didnt want anything to change.

The beliefs of the transcendental movement affected the lives of women, even though those changes werent immediate. Margaret Fuller, a transcendentalist, was one person whose beliefs affected the women's rights movement because her philosophy began with the belief that women, could develop a relationship with God that gave them identity. Fuller believed that every woman deserved independence.

Woman started to gain their own independence in the Second Great Awakening where they held more authority within their household and influence in family life, such as timing their pregnancies, because of their spiritual activism. Some women joined the Independent Order of Good Templars, which was a family oriented temperance organization that allowed them to have full membership.

Other women started to reform education, and many women supported a movement led by Horace Mann to increase the number of elementary schools and improve the quality of education. Mann lengthened the school year, established teaching methods in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and improved instruction by hiring women as teachers. Catherine Beecher founded academies for young women, and she believed that women were better qualified than men for moral and intellectual instruction. By the 1850s, the majority of teachers were women, because of Beecher's arguments, and because they could hire them with lower salaries than men.

By the 1840s, women were becoming more involved in the women's rights movement. They wanted to strengthen the legal rights of married women, especially with property, and they won support from men who wanted to protect their daughters from irresponsible son in laws with money, and to protect their family businesses. In 1848, women activists won a statute that gave women full legal control over their property they brought to their marriage.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were the most prominent figures in this movement. In 1860, with the help of Stanton and other women, Anthony secured a New York law which granted women the right to control their own wages, to own property, and if widowed, woman can have sole guardianship of their children.

I think the women's rights movement is interesting to learn about because its hard to imagine what life was like for women then and also to compare women's lives now to what it was back then. I think its hard to imagine what women's lives would be like if women didnt do anything about rights and equality.

"Dark Satonic Mills"

There are always two sides to every story, and I think it's interesting how this period of history during when mills were developing, has both a good side and bad side, even though I think there is more bad during this time than there is good. I think it was good how people were finding ways to be more efficient and allowing women to have more independence, but there were doing alot of bad things.

First, they were starting to destroy the environment, which upsets me because of how people didnt recognize that they were doing this. By building those mills, they had to cut down numerous trees, which means they were destroying alot of habitat for the wildlife in the areas they were building. I dont understand how they didnt know or care about what they were doing to the land and how it would affect future generations. This is more of a modern way of thinking though, and its hard to separate modern views from the views from during this time

While it was a good thing that the owners of the mills were hiring women, helping them gain independence and earn money for themselves and families, they were also exploiting them by paying low wages and having them work long hours. The workers were like slaves in a way because they were doing hard work that the owners werent doing and were gaining profits from. The textbook says that the women were living in better conditions than in the crowded farmhouses, and could go to plays, concerts, and lectures, which is an improvement to what they lived in before, but they were working about 12 hours a day, 6 days a week.

Transcendentalism

One of the other classes I'm taking besides history is American Literature. In my literature class, we just finished learning about the transcendental movement and read Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walden by Henry David Thoreau. These two classes usually follow along with each other, but after reading chapter 9 in the history book, it didnt feel like they did.

Transcendentalism developed in the 1830's and 1840's and was based on ideas of being self-reliant, self-improvement, love of nature and simplicity, but the book doesnt really go into transcendentalism too much in chapter 9, but mentions Emerson in chapter 8 and his role in the American Renaissance.

After reading Emerson and Thoreau in literature, which their books were published in the 1850's and 1860's, I thought that there would be more movements towards being self-reliant and more of Jefferson's ideas of yeomen farmers. Instead there was the Industrial Revolution, and I was kind of surprised at how quickly American society changed during that time. It seemed to get more corrupt because more people began to value wealth more than anything else and people in the upper class were looking down more on poorer people who werent able to make a better life of themselves because the upper class exploited them so much. But I dont think the Industrial Revolution was bad because America wouldnt be the same without it.