The Second Great Awakening and Women's Role in Social Reform - Prof. Lawrence Varo | Study notes World History

REVIVAL AND REFORM1

Regardless of theology, all [revivalists] shared a belief in individual improvement and

self-reliance as moving forces. In this way the Second Great Awakening bred reform, and

evangelical Protestants became missionaries for both religious and secular salvation.

Wherever they preached, voluntary reform societies arose. Evangelists organized an

association for each issue--temperance, education, Sabbath observance, antidueling, and

later antislavery; collectively these groups formed a national web of benevolent and

moral reform societies.

Beyond conversion, the great impact of the Second Great Awakening was the spread of

women’s involvement in benevolent activities to ameliorate the growing social ills. In

Andover, Massachusetts, local revivalism began in 1814 with a female group for uplifting

morals, a society to banish swearing, to observe the Sabbath, and to avoid drunkenness.

In 1815, women formed the Female Charitable Society, and a year later youth were

gathered into the Juvenile Bible Society. During the 1820s, without any revivals in

Andover, the benevolent societies brought in new church members, of whom 70 to 80

percent were women.

Women were the earliest converts, and they tended to sustain the Second Great

Awakening. When Finney led daytime prayer meetings in Rochester, New York, for

instance, pious middle-class women visited families while the men were away at work.

Slowly they brought their families and husbands into the churches under the influence of

reform. Although many businessmen stayed and recruited their employees, churches and

reform societies were influenced by women. Women more than men tended to feel

personally responsible for the increasingly secular orientation of the expanding market

economy. Many women felt guilty for neglecting their religious duties, and the

emotionally charged conversion experience set them on the right path again.

At first, revival seemed to reinforce the cult of domesticity because piety and religious

values were associated with the domestic sphere. In the conversion experience, women

declared their submissiveness to the will of Providence, vowing to purge themselves and

the world of wickedness. The organized prayer groups and female missionary societies

that accompanied the Second Great Awakening were surpassed by greater organized

religious and benevolent activity. Thus revival led to new public roles for women,

providing a path of certainty and stability amid a rapidly changing economy and society.

1Revival and Reform Source: Norton, Mary Beth, Chapter 12, “Reform, Politics, and Expansion, 1824-

1844,” in A People and a Nation: A History of the United States, Vol. I to 1877, p. 344.

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REVIVAL AND REFORM^1

Regardless of theology, all [revivalists] shared a belief in individual improvement and self-reliance as moving forces. In this way the Second Great Awakening bred reform, and evangelical Protestants became missionaries for both religious and secular salvation. Wherever they preached, voluntary reform societies arose. Evangelists organized an association for each issue--temperance, education, Sabbath observance, antidueling, and later antislavery; collectively these groups formed a national web of benevolent and moral reform societies. Beyond conversion, the great impact of the Second Great Awakening was the spread of women’s involvement in benevolent activities to ameliorate the growing social ills. In Andover, Massachusetts, local revivalism began in 1814 with a female group for uplifting morals, a society to banish swearing, to observe the Sabbath, and to avoid drunkenness. In 1815, women formed the Female Charitable Society, and a year later youth were gathered into the Juvenile Bible Society. During the 1820s, without any revivals in Andover, the benevolent societies brought in new church members, of whom 70 to 80 percent were women. Women were the earliest converts, and they tended to sustain the Second Great Awakening. When Finney led daytime prayer meetings in Rochester, New York, for instance, pious middle-class women visited families while the men were away at work. Slowly they brought their families and husbands into the churches under the influence of reform. Although many businessmen stayed and recruited their employees, churches and reform societies were influenced by women. Women more than men tended to feel personally responsible for the increasingly secular orientation of the expanding market economy. Many women felt guilty for neglecting their religious duties, and the emotionally charged conversion experience set them on the right path again. At first, revival seemed to reinforce the cult of domesticity because piety and religious values were associated with the domestic sphere. In the conversion experience, women declared their submissiveness to the will of Providence, vowing to purge themselves and the world of wickedness. The organized prayer groups and female missionary societies that accompanied the Second Great Awakening were surpassed by greater organized religious and benevolent activity. Thus revival led to new public roles for women, providing a path of certainty and stability amid a rapidly changing economy and society. (^1) Revival and Reform Source: Norton, Mary Beth, Chapter 12, “Reform, Politics, and Expansion, 1824- 1844,” in A People and a Nation : A History of the United States, Vol. I to 1877, p. 344.

THE DYNAMIC WEST^2

Both South and North developed strategies of western expansion that were designed to protect their societies. The South established new plantations, selling slaves to the south and west, and tried to keep new territories open to such settlement. The North sent farmers and townspeople to occupy the land to replicate the linkages among agriculture, community life, and industry that prevailed in the Northeast. Although the south did establish a dynamic society in Texas, overall the North was far more successful. By 1860 the westward movement had taken about half the nation’s 31.4 million people west of the Appalachian Mountains, but the great majority of the westerners lived in the states of the Old Northwest, rather than Texas and the old southwest. As people moved westward, agriculture and industry developed in close conjunction, and the economies of the Northeast and the Old Northwest both converged in structure and became inextricably linked. All the peoples of two regions--even those of southern origin living in the Ohio Valley--became closely bound up in the economic and social life of the North. .......................................................................................................................................... During the 1840s and 1850s southern society became increasingly dependent on slavery. Planters exploited the system of slavery more aggressively as a source of profits and developed an elaborate defense of it in order to control slaves and guarantee the loyalty of non-slave-holding whites. In response to the growing intensification of work and the disruption of their lives, slaves devised elaborate networks of family and community support. The South’s commitment to a slave-labor system placed the region in direct competition with the North over the future of the West. Meanwhile, industrialization [and the market economy] accelerated and tightened its hold on northeastern society by stimulating spectacular gains in productivity, income, and middle-class consumption. In addition, it accelerated the settlement of the Old northwest, helping to fill the land of the Great Lakes basin and the prairies of the Mississippi Valley with people from the Northeast, and to stimulate the flourishing of commerce and industry in new western towns and cities. In short, industrialization bound together the Northeast and the Old Northwest. Class distinctions further hardened, however, particularly because industrialization attracted immigrants, especially from Ireland, who were poor and Catholic. Both northerners and southerners agreed on the need for continued westward expansion, and on the Manifest Destiny of continental expansion. Consequently, during the 1840s, they embarked on great migrations across the Great Plains to British-American Oregon, to the desolate terrain of the Great Basin, and to the vast territories of Mexican California. But southern planters faced disappointment when the future of California--the culmination of Manifest Destiny--proved to be one of free soil. (^2) Westward Expansion Source: Henretta James, A. America’s History: Volume I to 1877, Chapter 13, “Sections and Sectionalism,” pp. 398, 409.

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Download The Second Great Awakening and Women's Role in Social Reform - Prof. Lawrence Varo and more Study notes World History in PDF only on Docsity!

REVIVAL AND REFORM^1

THE DYNAMIC WEST^2