Topics on the Page

Alexis de Tocqueville
 

Democracy in America/Volume I (1835) and Volume II (1839)
 

19th Century Reforms

•  Link to Special Topic Page on Voting Rights in Early 19th Century America

Suffrage in Antebellum America

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Sojourner Truth
• Susan B. Anthony

Women's Reform Movements Before and After the Civil War

• Women's Academies
• Mary Jane Patterson, first African American woman to graduate from college
  

Timeline of National Expansion and Reform 1815 to 1860

Antebellum America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqmbM5emWzQ

Lesson Plan Ideas: 

- I did not find this idea online, but when talking with a peer he said the best way students learn he feels is through demonstration or simulations. I think a good lesson that you could do was have half of the classroom be suffragettes and the other half be the people or important people in government that opposed the women having the right to vote. They could each research a person and then debate in class why each side felt a certain way or have an actual debate about why or why not women should have the right to vote. 

-From this page I found a great teaching resource called Edsitement.gov it is a great website with a lot of great lesson plans. This lesson plan is an overall about Women's rights and the suffrage movement. It has multimedia outlets within itself. 

-This is another lesson plan from the same site that basically gives an overview of the main women involved with the suffrage movement. 

Focus Question: Who was Alexis de Tocqueville and what was the importance of his book, Democracy in America?

1) Alexis de Tocqueville was born July 29, 1805, in Verneuil, France and studied law in Paris. With the French publicist Gustave Auguste de Beaumont de la Bonninière, he went abroad in 1831 to study the penal system in the U.S.

The two men reported their findings in Du système pénitentiaire aux États-Unis et son application en France (The Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, 1832).

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US he was impressed by how the government functioned in comparison to the European governments he was used to:
"What strikes the European who travels across the United States is the absence of what among us we call government or administration. In america, you see written laws; you see their daily execution; everything is in motion around you, and the motor is nowhere to be seen. The hand that runs the social machine escapes at every moment... The Revolution in the United States was produced by a mature and thoughtful taste for liberty, and not by a vague and undefined instinct for independence. It was not based upon passions for disorder; on the contrary, it proceeded with love of order and of legality" - Alexis de Tocqueville

 For more biographical information go to All About Alexis de Tocqueville from CSpan's The Alexis de Tocqueville Tour: Exploring Democracy in America.

Tocqueville C-Span: Retracing the Steps of Alexis De Tocqueville's 1831 Journey

• Tocqueville and Beaumont Itinerary, May 9, 1831 to February 20, 1832. Dates are hyperlinked to selected journal entries.

• Descriptions of America: Journal Entries and Correspondence.

• Use this site to explore more of Tocqueville's published work.

Suffrage in antebellum America was granted only to white property owning males. Tocqueville points out in his text that women and men have completely separate roles in society in America, and this extends to political matters as well.

• "In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes, and both are required to keep in step, but along paths that are never the same." - Tocqueville

2) Democracy in America - Tocqueville wrote his most famous work, Democracy in America (2 volumes, 1835-40; trans., 4 volumes, 1835-40).

• One of the earliest and most profound studies of American life, it concerns the legislative and administrative systems in the U.S. and the influence of social and political institutions on the habits and manners of the people. 

• Tocqueville maintains in this work that the full development of democracy occurred in the U.S. because conditions there best permitted the diffusion of European social ideas.

• He was highly critical of certain aspects of American democracy. For example, he believed that public opinion tended toward tyranny and that majority rule could be as oppressive as the rule of a despot.

• He also saw equality as a threat to liberty arguing that people caught in its tide-especially in France- need to take lessons from America as to how to protect liberty and guard it against the tendency of equality that will lead to despotism. 

• In a review of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Leo Damrosch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), George Scialabba ("To Look for America," Boston Sunday Globe, April 18, 2010, p. c6), wrote: "What did Tocqueville discover in America? By now we all know, or think we do: tyranny of the majority, the rise of individualism, the pervasive influence of commerce on character, and above all, the reciprocal effects of a society's institutions and it moeurs, that versatile French work that signifies morals, customs, attitudes and, most expressively, 'habits of the heart'."

• Later in his review, Scialabba quotes John Stuart Mill who had joined Tocqueville in stating that the United States had overcome the nature of governments based on kings and nobles where "the class interests of small minorities wielding the powers of legislation, in opposition both to the general interest and to the general opinion of the community. . . a tacit compact among the various knots of men who profit by abuses, to stand by on another in resisting reform."

Click here for a lesson plan on Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America from Edsitement. Click here for a lesson plan on Alexis de Tocqueville from Worcester Public Schools

• Full Audiobook of Democracy in America

19th Century Reforms: Successes and Failures and the Movement towards Reclusiveness

"From Utopian societies to the Second Great Awakening to the Abolition movement, American society was undergoing great changes in the first half of the 19th century. Attempts at idealized societies popped up (and universally failed) at Utopia, OH, New Harmony, IN, Modern Times, NY, and many other places around the country. These utopians had a problem with mainstream society, and their answer was to withdraw into their own little worlds. Others didn't like the society they saw, and decided to try to change it. Relatively new protestant denominations like the Methodists and Baptists reached out to "the unchurched" during the Second Great Awakening, and membership in evangelical sects of Christianity rose quickly. At the same time, Abolitionist societies were trying to free the slaves. Americans of the 19th century had looked at the world they were living in, and decided to change it."


Click here for a lesson plan that includes a great activity for students to compare reforms from the mid 1800s to progressive reforms and advancements today.
 

View: History Crash Course of 19th Century Reforms

Focus Question: How did women's participation in political life expand during the years before the Civil War?

• Click here for a timeline of important events and people that took part during the women's suffrage movement.

During the 1800s, America was caught in the winds of change, especially in terms of the social and political strides made by females who spearheaded the reformist movement.

• The movement inspired women to join by convincing them that they could have a legitimate say in political reforms.

• These women worked towards prison reforms, educational reforms, and most significantly, abolition.

• They alluded towards universal equal rights, universal suffrage, equal pay, and temperance.

• Important women included Susan B. Anthony, Carry Nation, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.

Click here to read more about Women's Rights Leaders from 1800-1900. Women included are Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Abby Kelley Foster, Sojourner Truth, Angelina Grimke, Wendell Philips, Amelia Bloomer, and Elizabeth Smith Miller.


View: Not Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (Full Documentary), Ken Burns

View: History Crash Course on Women in the 19th Century

View: Susan B. Anthony For Kids Video

Susan B. Anthony 

One Sentence Overview: Susan B. Anthony was an American writer, lecturer and abolitionist who was a leading figure in the women's voting rights movement. Raised in a Quaker household, Anthony went on to work as a teacher. She later partnered with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and would eventually lead the National American Woman Suffrage Association (Source). 

          Here is a short 3 minute video on Susan B. Anthony which is nice to show when you are focused on the overall history of her as a person. 

Here is an overall timeline of Anthony's life which would show a good background and also exhibit how slowly it took for her efforts to pay off. 

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an early women's rights activist who wrote the Declaration of Sentiments, which outlined key ideas to spark interest in the upcoming womens' suffrage and womens' rights movements that would emerge for the next century.

• Stanton and her husband were also avid abolitionists.

• Stanton's stance on universal rights inspired many to consider allowing both women and blacks the right to vote and participate in the government.

• She also collaborated with other revolutionary thinkers of the time such as Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

• Click here to read Elizabeth Cady Stanton's biography from National Park Service.

• Click here to read Elizabeth Cady Stanton's biography National Women's History Museum.

The Smithsonian has posted a short history of the Seneca Falls Convention. It includes portraits of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, and Susan B. Anthony.

For more on women's participation in politics, go to the website, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000.



Click here to watch One Woman One Vote on the movement.

Along with Stanton, other women joined the suffrage movement during the antebellum period. After a meeting with Stanton, Susan B. Anthony decided to join the suffrage movement, and make it her mission to fight for women's rights.

• Digital History has an overview of life before the Civil War. Includes teaching resources, documents, images, etc.

• Click here for the National Women's History Museum section on women's rights from the 1830s to 1920s

• For more information on Antebellum women, go to Women's Reform Movement from Beyond the Textbook

Sojourner Truth

• Go to Antebellum Women's Rights from PBS for more information on women activists.

Go to This Far by Faith for an overview of Sojourner Truth and her efforts for equality and the end to slavery in the United States.

• The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850) is a digital text of her autobiography.

• Ain't I A Woman Speech, December 1851

Click here for a selection of primary sources from Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Click here to read a biography on Susan B. Anthony.

Click here for a lesson plan from the Gilder Lehrman Institute of National History that asks students to compare women's lives before the Civil War to life during the Civil War using a number of websites.


Women's reform movements truly gathered momentum after the civil war during the Progressive Movement.

• During the antebellum period, women largely spearheaded the progressive movement towards educational and social reform.

• The leading issue for these reformists was industrialization and the various social issues associated with it, including poor working conditions, child labor. and pollutants that compromised public health and the average standard of living.

• Women reformists practiced "maternalist politics," meaning they would focus on issues that appealed to women as wives and mothers. This would promote the idea that women could still embody domesticity and maternity in the public sphere as much as they could within the household.

• This is a repetitive theme throughout women's history, as reform movements throughout the 20th century regarding education, labor, prohibition, and especially environmental movements were largely spearheaded by groups of women.

Notable achievements of the Women's Reform Movements

• benefited from increased opportunities and changes in social attitudes which became apparent before the Civil War

• more women were able to receive an education, although they often faced opposition and ridicule in their attempts

• More women were able to find work, although the jobs and salaries available to them were more limited than for men

• American women began their first organized effort to right the gender wrongs of society and achieve political, social and economic equality for women

• Although many of their goals, including the right to vote, were not achieved until the twentieth century, the activist women of antebellum America laid the vital groundwork upon which progress could be made

Women Academics Established

• Through the nineteenth century, higher education became more widely available to women.
• Women's academies were established, including the two most famous: Troy Female Academy (founded in 1821 by Emma Willard) and Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (founded in 1837 by Mary Lyon).
• Troy was the first private secondary school for women in the United States, while Mount Holyoke became the first women's college in the United States.

• Oberlin College, a coeducational institution, was founded in 1833, and was the first American college to accept women and African Americans.
• Oberlin was one of the few placed at which African American women could receive an education.
• Between 1835 and 1865, at least 140 African-American women attended Oberlin College, many of whom were former slaves.
• Most took only a few classes, often to strengthen their basic literacy skills.
• Twelve of them graduated from the ladies course, which was not as rigorous as the bachelors degree program.
• Three, however, graduated with B.A. degrees.
• The first African-American woman to receive a bachelors degree was Mary Jane Patterson, graduating from Oberlin in 1862.
• Patterson went on to become the principal of a high school for black students in Washington, D.C.

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Click here to learn more about women's roles in social reforms after the civil war: Women in the Progressive movement