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Women's Activism and Social Change
Rochester, New York, 1822–1872
Nancy A. Hewitt (Author)
9780801495090
Paperback / softback, published 28 January 1988
282 pages, 22 tables - 22 Tables, black and white
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.454 kg
A model for future community studies and a welcome addition to women's history. Hewitt substantially advances discussion of 'women's place' and its relation to class, community, family, and feminism. Women's Activism and Social Change merits a careful reading by scholars of women's history and nineteenth-century social movements. Nancy A. Hewitt's examination of women's organized activities in Rochester raises critical questions about the tendency of historians to trace a direct causal line from the earliest female benevolent activities and missionary societies through evangelical reform movements to the birth of a feminist movement in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.... Hewitt demonstrates clearly that women of different class origins acted in ways consonant with the values of their social location, an excellent antidote to romanticized generalizations about 'women' as a group. The most detailed and scholarly study we have to date of women's reform activity at a local level. It is thoroughly researched, carefully organized, and well written... and provides a solid, insightful, and indispensable benchmark against which to measure future scholarship. Hewitt demonstrates clearly that women of different class origins acted in ways consonant with the values of their social location, an excellent antidote to romanticized generalizations about 'women' as a group.
In Women's Activism and Social Change, Nancy A. Hewitt 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, 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 communialism and religious democracy to advocate full racial and sexual equality.
Introduction1. Material and Moral Progress2. A Profusion of Pathways3. From Amelioration to Perfection4. Moral Crusades and Ultraist Alternatives5. Coalitions and Confrontations6. Union or Liberty7. Never Another Season of SilenceTables
Index