Unit 2: Selection Vocabulary 3

As a result, the middle class grew and increasingly lived in cities rather than the country. There was now a critical mass of people who had the time to engage in social change.

Eager to be educated, diverse audiences, sometimes in the hundreds and thousands, would come to hear a traveling lecturer.

The Second Great Awakening featured emotional and enthusiastic revival meetings with dynamic speakers, which expanded membership and leveraged reform movements to work towards a more perfect society.

Sojourner Truth’s famous “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech at a women’s rights convention in 1851 critiques the movement for condemning the injustices of slavery while simultaneously excluding African American women.

Two years later, as the Civil War continued, another of Lincoln’s famous speeches, his Gettysburg Address, helped to dedicate a National Cemetery on the site of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The beauty of home would be destroyed, the delicacy of the sex be violated, the dignity of halls of legislation degraded, by an attempt to introduce them there.

Woman could take part in the processions, the songs, the dances of old religion; no one fancied her delicacy was impaired by appearing in public for such a cause.

We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty.

If fewer talents were given her, yet if allowed the free and full employment of these, so that she may render back to the giver his own with usury, she will not complain; nay, I dare to say she will bless and rejoice in her earthly birth-place, her earthly lot.

In so far as he possessed the keys to the wonders of this universe, he allowed free use of them to her, and, by the incentive of a high expectation, he forbade, so far as possible, that she should let the privilege lie idle.

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

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

In the covenant of marriage, she is compelled to promise obedience to her husband, he becoming, to all intents and purposes, her master—the law giving him power to deprive her of her liberty, and to administer chastisement.

He allows her in church, as well as state, but a subordinate position, claiming apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the church.

He has endeavored, in every way that he could, to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life.