A History of the United States: Chapter 15: The Spirit of Reform

Finley was describing an early nineteenth-century religious meeting called a revival. At this time, people traveled great distances to hear preachers speak and to pray, sing, weep, and shout.

Some reformers sought to improve society by forming utopias—communities based on a vision of the perfect society.

Beecher and other reformers called for temperance, or drinking little or no alcohol.

They used lectures, pamphlets, and revival-style rallies to warn people of the dangers of liquor.

Partly because of his efforts, in 1839 Massachusetts founded the nation's first state-supported normal school—a school for training high school graduates to become teachers.

American authors and artists developed their own style and explored American themes.

Thoreau practiced civil disobedience—refusal to obey laws he found unjust.

Among the reformers of the early 1800s were abolitionists, who sought the end of slavery.

Abolitionists sometimes risked prison and death to help African Americans escape slavery. They helped create a network of escape routes from the South to the North called the Underground Railroad.

Also, Northern workers had to pay for their own goods and services from their small earnings, while enslaved African Americans received food, clothing, and medical care.

The most controversial issue, however, was the call for woman suffrage, or the right to vote in elections.

Anthony was the daughter of a Quaker abolitionist. She called for equal pay and college training for women, and coeducation—the teaching of males and females together.

Other people thought that women could be trained to be capable teachers and to fill other professional roles.

Women had to struggle to become doctors or work in the ministry.

For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child.

Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.