Why do reform movements happen

This is not a later interpretation of what the self-declared reformers were up to, but was often expressed by the leading reformers themselves, who were individually attuned to philosophical and political trends in Europe, especially in France, Germany, and England, as they evolved after the radicalism of the French Revolution, and the resulting efforts there to abolish monarchies and long-established religious authorities.

American reformers read this essentially as an effort to endow each person in an egalitarian society with a supreme autonomy over his or her own affairs. They discovered, however, a paradox at the heart of this effort—autonomous people were wayward and often needed to be coerced into egalitarian reform, which meant that a larger authority, such as the State, needed to negate individual autonomy in order to bring about an egalitarian society.

Such has been the paradox at the heart of socialism ever since. Historians have often focused on the antebellum period as the "era of reform" in America, culminating in the anti-slavery crusade of the Civil War, but it is also true that did not mark the end of the reform movement, but initiated a period that persists until today in which reformers, seemingly vindicated by the end of slavery as a result of the war, shifted their thinking so as to focus on the secular State, particularly the federal government, as the main instrument for reforming society along Progressive lines.

Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers, , revised edition. New York: Hill and Wang, Steven L. Reform Movements Rhode Island textile mills hire women to make cloth. She becomes a crusader for African Americans and women. Moral reform was a campaign in the s and s to abolish sexually immoral behavior licentiousness , prostitution, and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market.

The adjourned meeting is held in Rochester, New York. The Declaration of Sentiments , based on the Declaration of Independence is adopted. Property is held in common, women have equal rights with men, and childcare is shared. At times, the slaves use the Underground Railroad. Their success inspires white waiters to establish a union.

Anthony and Samuel J. May are burned in effigy in Syracuse, New York by mobs opposed to abolition. Civilian whites travel to the South to educate former slaves and supervise their work as free laborers.

These schools allow women to earn low-cost degrees. It was the first central trades council in the United States. It gives free legal aid to workers, acts as employment agencies, and lobbies for laws to protect women workers. Its goal is to promote higher education and professional possibilities for women.

Her boat runs on Lake Champlain. He is a pioneer of integrated baseball. Wells , newspaper owner in Memphis, Tennessee begins a nation-wide anti-lynching campaign. Mary Church Terrell is the first president. Investigations following the fire lead to the enactment of several New York state labor laws.

In the twentieth century, later generations attacked these institutions, again in the name of reform. As one might expect from the diversity of antebellum reforms, they had different points of origin and different trajectories, but there were some common patterns. They most frequently looked less like a unified movement than a shifting collection of organizations with occasional schisms and different constituencies and agendas.

European observers, including the most famous of them all, Alexis de Tocqueville, noted with some bemusement an American penchant for joining voluntary associations. These associations could serve a number of different purposes, from religious to purely social, or anything in between.

They were, nonetheless, effective tools for sustaining reform movements on the local level. There was also a degree of overlapping membership within antebellum reform.

Abolitionists, for instance, tended to endorse temperance, although temperance—one of the few reforms strong in the South—did not necessarily mark one as an abolitionist. Finally, reform movements were all subject to economic and political fluctuations. A devastating financial panic and subsequent depression beginning in , for example, made funding scarce for reform organizations generally.

Explaining why reform movements emerged in antebellum America is no simple task. Their proliferation was the product of a convergence of multiple changes in American life, none of which necessarily caused the explosion of reforms, but all of which, taken together, enabled and shaped it.

At the most basic level, reform movements require people who believe that human effort can—and should—change things.

That has not always been the case. In their optimism about change, antebellum reformers were heirs of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century shifts in secular and religious thought.

On the secular side was a new faith in human reason and its power to remake the world, a faith manifested in the American and French revolutions. Antebellum reform also drew heavily on an early nineteenth-century wave of Protestant revivalism, often called the Second Great Awakening. In complicated ways this form of evangelical Christianity encouraged some believers not all to engage in reform movements. Religion, nonetheless, gave antebellum reform its moral urgency, just as secular languages of reason and rights also molded it.

Economic, demographic, and technological changes likewise inspired and shaped antebellum reform. Although America remained predominately a rural and small-town nation into the twentieth century, its cities were growing after Urban areas provided some of the problems reformers addressed, but they and small towns also had the critical mass of people and resources reform organizations required.

Urban growth and an expanding economy, moreover, produced a new middle class with a level of financial comfort and leisure time necessary to engage in reform. Among its members were educated women denied much of a public voice except in religious and reform activities.