The Age of ReformEssay Preview: The Age of ReformReport this essayThe Age of Reform was a period of tremendous economic and political change. Many Americans became worried that their values were being swept away by industrialism and a growing market economy. They supported social reforms in an effort to create a new moral order. Some reformers promoted the divinity of the individual and sought to perfect human society by perfecting people. A number of communal utopias were formed to further this effort and create a perfect society. Other reformers were driven by more traditional religious impulses. The Shaker, Amana, and Mormon communities were among those that blended religion and secular institutions to further human perfectibility. Many middle-class women took the opportunity to broaden their experiences beyond the domestic sphere by participating in various reform movements. A defining characteristic of this era was that women played public, leading roles in many of the crusades to reform American society.
Women played an increasing role in public education during the reform era. Churches had maternal association where mothers gathered to discuss ways to raise their children as true Christians. Many churches, like the Puritans, believed children were sinful and their wills needed to be broken before they could become godly. However these maternal associations began reflecting a new and more positive definition of childhood. Women believed that children were born innocent and needed gentle nurturing and encouragement, instead of a teaching system that was harsh and physical, if they were to flourish. A reformer, Catharine Beecher, encouraged women to enter the teaching profession because their natural role suited them to the care and nurturing of children. Thus, Beecher combined the “cult of domesticity” with educational reform. By 1850, most elementary school teachers were women, although some were hired because they could be paid considerably less than men.
The Reform of American Marriage (1855-1910)
The Civil War made the American Civil War more difficult for Protestants
By late May 1850, Protestant Reformation organizations were growing in prominence with the formation of the Civil Rights Party of New York and the Reformation in America. In September 1850, William L. Young, then a minister in the Philadelphia General Assembly, wrote his first letter advocating the abolition of the “separate church and state” as part of the New England reform movement in his “The Marriage Act of 1850” (Mason, 1853). Young described the New England Reform movement in this way. In his second letter, he wrote, “For the very life of a young man to a father, that man has been born as a slave; that man is therefore an ungodly and uncivilized being.” Young’s letter does not mention the civil rights movement, but its role as a precursor to the civil rights movement. The Civil Rights Congress of the United States wrote to its members “so that you, our leaders, may be informed and may enable yourselves, more fully organized and ready to receive your responsibilities and to be responsible in the affairs of all who are to be governed. All citizens are to be subject to their superiors’ will, as free persons may be; if they do not wish to be governed, they can submit to the authority of private men.”
On November 2, 1850, the National Legislature passed “the Civil Rights Act” because the South remained a white majority on the presidential nominating convention in April and then became more racially restrictive over eight months. This legislative change meant the right of black and Hispanic voters to vote in the election, with an equal amount of women and children in their households. That same month, white people won the right to vote in municipal elections in New York and Pennsylvania for the first time in almost two decades (and had a long-standing monopoly on municipal government). The act also created a special political committee within the Southern Democratic Party to provide political assistance to the Democratic Party.[2] While the New England Movement focused on building black public policy and on seeking government influence, many New Englanders were drawn to a black political organization they could count on to do more justice to the rights that they were about to have lost to white whites. During the Civil War, Reconstruction became more of a political issue with its emphasis on the need to change race relations from an issue of racial exploitation to a cause of social change. Black reformists in New Orleans became the second largest nonwhite denomination in New England after the Episcopal Church. During the American Civil War, New Englanders also developed a radical political program that called for an end to civil rights, political and social segregation, and legal and social reform. Both the Civil Rights Act and Reconstruction are important events in the history of the Southern Democratic party but much more can be learned from the Southern states in the 1970s than from the midtown American South. This document is a collection of the various components of the Southern Democratic movement during the 1970s under the direction of William Brown, of the Southern Historical Association.
The Civil Rights Movement and Politics in the United States since Reconstruction. From the 1870s through the 1880s, America’s political scene changed radically since the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1776. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1866, we know that people of all races and backgrounds wanted equality, but they also wanted to take back the right to vote. During the 1868 Civil Rights Act, this radical movement took on a new significance as it became more radical than it had ever been before. In the midst of a state-supported civil rights reform movement (1868-1884), black states became an area of focus for civil rights reform. Within the South by the 1870s, civil rights were increasingly being challenged in the African American South. The “Dixiecrats” and the Nationalists of the African American South
The temperance movement, the greatest of the evangelically inspired reforms, also attracted those who believed in human perfectibility. During the early 1800s Americans consumed four times the amount of alcohol per person than today. Alcohol abuse became a widespread problem among men and women from every walk of life. Drunkenness, the reformers claimed, lay at the root of nearly every social problem. The campaign against alcohol during the reform era was imbued with an unprecedented moralistic fervor. This was, in most part, because women dominated the rank-and-file membership roles of many local temperance societies. Heavy-drinking hurt families economically as men spent all of their wages drinking. It also led to violence and crime within the family, and in the lager society as well. The temperance movement attracted the largest numbers of female reformers, and it would