Post Antebellum Movement

Amy Bushong
HIS 350R
Spring 2017
Post-Antebellum Essay
Changing the Game During the post-antebellum period, women’s rights activism experienced a shift after the advent of the twentieth century. The end of the American Civil War brought forth an era of temperance, spearheaded by women’s groups such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and providing a platform on which to build the case for women’s suffrage, stressing the morality and piety that they would bring to politics. As the movement progressed into the twentieth century, women’s activism focused largely on their role in the economy and traded in their piety and temperance for socialist ideologies, aggressive tactics, and a newfound focus on issues of labor and poverty. Through

According to Ruth Bordin in her essay The Temperance Crusade as a Feminist Movement, the “missionary societies of the several Protestant denominations, as well as the churches themselves, provided already functioning female networks…” (Bordin, 218). Though the temperance movement was separate from a specific religious campaign the WCTU was “certainly church oriented” (Bordin, 218), an ideological association that facilitated the gravity of the movement. Additionally, the new gender dynamic in home economics assured the new generation of middle class women that they were no longer expected to contribute to the family income, a burden that fell solely on their husbands, and thus leaving more leisure time available for reforming duties. The growing economic security of middleclass women during this period reinforced the idea that feminism was an upper class white woman’s issue, a suggestion that WCTU was quick to distance themselves from by not speaking out about the feminist platform and focusing instead on bringing the spiritual/domestic duties that were traditionally allotted to the private sphere into the public

These women based their rights to the public sphere not through spiritual piety or religious rhetoric, but through the same language used to legitimize economic equality and defend men’s political enfranchisement, asserting that “theirs was a feminism that was part of a broad democratic push. Until now, feminism in the United States, unlike its British counterpart, had few ties to working-class constituents.” (Stansell, 151). The strong association between the newly dubbed “feminist movement” and the question of labor rights was essential to the idea of being a working woman during the twentieth century. The WTUL, or Women’s Trade Union League, was founded in 1903 (Stansell, 153) and functioned as a kind of liaison between middle class, college educated women who could utilize their own social clout to protect working class women, and female industrial workers. The main appeal that the new feminist platform had for workingwomen was the knowledge that if women had the right to vote then they could affect politics in a meaningful way, passing legislation that would establish reasonable working hours and conditions along with laws dismissing child labor, a cause traditionally spearheaded by