Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872

Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872
ISBN-10
0739102974
ISBN-13
9780739102978
Category
Social Science
Pages
296
Language
English
Published
2001
Publisher
Lexington Books
Author
Nancy A. Hewitt

Description

Women's Activism and Social Change challenges the popular belief that the lives of antebellum women focused on their role in the private sphere of the family. Examining intense and well-documented reform movements in nineteenth-century Rochester, New York, Nancy Hewitt distinguishes three networks of women's activism: women from the wealthiest Rochester families who sought to ameliorate the lives of the poor; those from upwardly mobile families who, influenced by evangelical revivalism, campaigned to eradicate such social ills as slavery, vice, and intemperance; and those who combined limited economic resources with an agrarian Quaker tradition of communalism and religious democracy to advocate full racial and sexual equality.

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