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.
- ISBN10 0801495091
- ISBN13 9780801495090
- Publish Date 28 January 1988 (first published 10 July 1984)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Cornell University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 282
- Language English