By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University
Secular reform movements, interestingly, preferred to follow the same trajectory as the religious reform movements, as some of them really were come-outers. Emerson’s Transcendentalists, was one such that tried their own experiment in communal living at Brook Farm, in 1841. Though many other reforms dotted the horizon, no kind of American reform reached as far, or aspired to change the relationship so fundamental as the reforms that touched on gender roles in American society. Why?
How the State Prohibition Law Came to Be
Following on the footsteps of secular reform movements, in 1842, 250 workers, teachers, laborers, even former slaves in Northampton, Massachusetts, formed an industrial co-op known as the Northampton Association, in order to provide an alternative model to industrial capitalism. In addition, Charles Grandison Finney’s college at Oberlin, Ohio, was organized, at least originally, as a manual labor institution in order to teach college students the dignity of laboring with one’s hands in a community setting.
As noble or visionary the intent maybe, the success rate for these secular reform movements wasn’t at par with the religious reforms often because the secular reformers made enemies more easily. The immigrants, especially, resented the desire of temperance activists to throw away their beer and whiskey. What’s more, the secular reform movements often reached for goals, with which it was much easier to measure for failure. Their greatest success, curiously, was in temperance.
In 1846, the state of Maine actually passed a state prohibition law, which was followed up in a dozen other states and territories. Finally, in 1919, temperance achieved its high point of success with the Eighteenth Amendment, and national prohibition of hard liquor in the United States, or at least passing that amendment was its high point of success.
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Ancient Patterns of Gender Subordination
As we know from the roaring ’20s, things tended to go downhill from there very, very quickly. None of the reforms were made, even remotely, in the direction of changing man-women relationship in American society.
From time immemorial, in European society, males had been assigned the primary role of providers and leaders, while the combined risks and necessities of biological reproduction limited the mobility of women. It also limited them, with but few exceptions, to the subordinate roles of giving supporting care to children, and performing gender-based women’s work in agriculture. Above all, women were expected to yield to the direction and the authority of men.
And yet, in America, recreating these ancient patterns of subordination, just like the recreation of all the other patterns of European social organization, was neither easy nor straightforward. The unending shortage of labor in the American colonies meant that women were able to move into the operation of business and service enterprises that before had been the preserve of male heads of households. Benjamin Franklin’s sister, Jane Meekham, ran her own Boston shop in the 1760s, along with Elizabeth Mary Smith, Margaret Hutchinson in Philadelphia, and Elizabeth Thomson in Charleston.
Voting Rights to Both the Genders
By the time the Revolution began talking about the triumph of natural rights over status and tradition, women in British North American society were quite ready to claim their own portion of those natural rights.
In 1783, the New Jersey voting statutes extended voting rights to all inhabitants of the state, irrespective of gender, “all those of full age who are worth 50 pounds”.
Men and Women Were Equal
In 1797, women voters in Essex County, New Jersey, nearly tipped the election to a Federalist candidate, leading the local Newark newspaper to marvel that, “The rights of man have been warmly insisted upon by Democrats, but we outstrip them in the science of government, and not only preach the rights of women, but boldly push it into practice.”
Allied to new public roles for women was a redefinition of the relation of husbands and wives within marriage. Marriage was understood now to be a union of companions, a union of equals—each complementing each other in the private world of the family.
How Marriages Changed
The cement of these unions—since they were the unions of equals, not of subordinates and inferiors—was to be affection, love, and intimacy, rather than interest or power. Wives were now free to voice opinions on subjects relative to their sphere, and though nothing in the law or the economy actually obliged husbands to pay any attention to those opinions, the expectation for companionate marriage was that consensus, and not dictatorship, was the proper result and the proper relationship.
However, undeniably, these new definitions of a woman’s sphere also had to cope with new stresses. The rise of the factory system meant that male heads of households were being drained out of the old localized agricultural economy and fed into the factory-based market economy.
For the first time in Western society, men moved out of domestic agricultural production or domestic manufacturing—as in a shoemaker’s establishment—and into a work environment that was completely divorced from the home. Women suddenly found themselves alone in the homes that had once been the site of mutual, but gender-based, sorts of economic production.
Common Questions about Secular Reform Movements and Gender Roles in the American Society
The unending shortage of labor in the American colonies meant that women were able to move into the operation of business and service enterprises that before had been the preserve of male heads of households.
In 1783, the New Jersey voting statutes extended voting rights to all inhabitants of the state, irrespective of gender, “all those of full age who are worth 50 pounds”.
Allied to new public roles for women was a redefinition of the relation of husbands and wives within marriage. Marriage was understood now to be a union of companions, a union of equals—each complementing each other in the private world of the family.
