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Reform Movements and Utopian Societies

Reform Movements and Utopian Societies. Questions for today: How did 19 th -century Americans seek to improve their society? How were their efforts at odds with one another?. Outline 1) Growing Middle Class 2) Second Great Awakening 3) Middle-class reform: - Temperance

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Reform Movements and Utopian Societies

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  1. Reform Movements and Utopian Societies

  2. Questions for today: How did 19th-century Americans seek to improve their society? How were their efforts at odds with one another? Outline 1) Growing Middle Class 2) Second Great Awakening 3) Middle-class reform: - Temperance - Stop prostitution 4) Utopian communities: New Harmony, Indiana Brook Farm, Mass. Oneida, NY

  3. 1. Growing Middle Class • Work ethic: sober, reliable • Cult of Domesticity: Women as moral guardians • Separate spheres

  4. Godey’s Lady’s Book (1850, 1851)

  5. 2. Second Great AwakeningCharles B. Finney,Evangelical preacher • Perfectionism • Conformity through reform • Only moral standard: Protestant middle class

  6. 3. Middle Class Reform: Temperance Movement • Alcoholism causes domestic violence • Techniques of revivalism

  7. “The Temperance “The Drunkard’sHome” (1850) Home”

  8. The Bottle (1848)

  9. Successes of Temperance Movement: • Reduced alcohol consumption • Helped fight violence against women • Women engaged in public activity

  10. Crusade against Prostitution • Female Moral Reform Society • Attacked the sexual double standard • Homes of Refuge • Causes: poverty and male demand

  11. 4. Utopian communities

  12. 1820-1860: wide range of experiments • Liberal: reform can reduce the worst aspects of capitalism (poverty) • Radical: capitalism has flaws that reform cannot fix. A new society is needed.

  13. New Harmony, Indiana, 1825-1827Robert Owen Frances Wright

  14. New Harmony, Indiana • Cooperation, not competition • Full racial equality • No marriage. “Free love” • Make birth control and divorce available

  15. Brook Farm, Mass., 1841-1846 • Both intellectual and manual labor • Transcendentalism: • Reality above everyday lives • Individualism

  16. Ralph Waldo Emerson • Mystical unity of nature • An original relation to the universe • Self-reliance (not organized religion)

  17. Henry David Thoreau • “To live deliberately” • Individualism: a different drummer • What is a life well lived?

  18. Oneida Community, NY, 1848-1881 John Humphrey Noyes • Perfectionism • Complex marriages • Outside the law • Strict rules about sex

  19. Oneida: children’s house

  20. Oneida: mansion

  21. Oneida: group photo

  22. Noyes in later years

  23. Oneida Silverware

  24. A vast array of proposals • Middle-class values: self-discipline, work • Self-determination (free love, no racism) • Complete individualism • Authoritarian structures • Competing assumptions about human nature

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