American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
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    • The Congregationalists >
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map
  J. William T. "Bill" Youngs, American Realities, Volume One: 
Historical Episodes from First Settlements to the Civil War, Chapter Twelve


                                   "Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1889," by Anna Elizabeth Klumpke 
                                    Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery 

12. Reform in the Early Republic
      The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848

Picture

Summary

In antebellum America, reformers adopted many causes. Besides trying to eradicate slavery, they advocated temperance and favored improving schools, hospitals, and prisons. Women were involved in each of these movements and sometimes discussed their own disadvantaged status while meeting to help other groups. But it was not until 1848 that the first American women’s rights convention convened in Seneca Falls, New York. The meeting highlighted how law and custom placed women in an inferior position and exposed the inconsistency between the egalitarian ideals of the young republic and the injustice of sexual discrimination. The resolutions adopted at the meeting would influence the women’s rights movement for more than a century.

Author Reads From the Text

From her early childhood Elizabeth grappled with the problem of being a female in a society that favored boys and men. The dichotomy between the two worlds was reflected in the development of her personality. She was a lively, intelligent child with sparkling eyes, a pretty face, and a vibrant sense of humor, but beneath this animated exterior she was depressed, given to dark thoughts and frightening nightmares. Although well behaved, she believed that she was tainted with evil. This anxiety may have also developed from her Presbyterian upbringing, with its emphasis on humankind’s innate sinfulness, and from the rigorous standards of conduct imposed by her parents.

But her uneasiness must have fed also on her sense of discontent with her gender role. She was attracted to male activities. As a child, she was a tomboy—a phrase used then and today to describe a young girl who enjoyed sports. As she grew older, she longed for educational and vocational opportunities that were provided only for boys. What was the source of these outlandish longings? Surely they were not a woman’s ideas.

It did not initially occur to her that her ambitions might be natural human aspirations, and she feared that their source must be an evil force. As a child, Elizabeth had a recurrent dream in which she had been fathered by Satan, and he wanted to reclaim her. After such dreams she would awaken with horror and with a troubled mind would creep to the top of the staircase where she could listen to the adult voices from the room below. These human sounds calmed her, returning her to her daily world.


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Chapter 11: Texas Revolution
Chapter 13: Manifest Destiny