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.