Acceptance
Tuthill, Louisa C. The Young Lady's Home. Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blakiston, 1848.
"Woman's lot may be deemed a lowly one, by those who look not into the deeper mysteries of human life; who know not the silent, resistless influences that mould the intellectual and moral character of mankind. Woman's lot is a high and holy one; and she "who fulfills the conditions required by conscience takes the surest way of answering the purposes of Providence." Conscientiously and cheerfully, then, go on with your own education, mental, physical and moral." (Tuthill 14)
"Woman owes her present elevation of character and condition to Christianity; in all countries where its benign, holy influence is unfelt, she is still and unintellectual, a degraded being, -- and just in proportion to its purity and its power over a people, is her domestic happiness" (Tuthill 93)
"The silent, resistless influence of home and the affections, -- this is woman's true glory" (Tuthill 99)
One 1848 guidebook advised young women that their "waking thoughts" should "be upon my Heavenly Father, who has spread over me the wings of love, and opened my eyes upon another day" This should be followed, "before breakfast" with a half hour of bible reading or prayer (Tuthill 184). And of course, upon retiring, "God's holy book" should be read, and a final benediction "for the aid and guidance of his Holy Spirit" offered. (Tuthill 185)
Rejection -1848 Seneca Falls
Sprague, Achsa. "Selections from Achsa Sprague's Diary and Journal." Ed. Leonard Twynham. Vermont History 9 (1941): 132-184.
Born 1828: Reformer, woman's rights activist (mainly unpublished) author
1855 Dec. 10: "Women must either by a slave or a butterfly or at least she is so at the present time. And if, following the prompting of the intellectual or philanthropic energies of her mind she dares to think, she dared to act out of the beaten tracked marked centuries ago for her to tread, straightway she become something out of the course of nature, a something for the curious to gape at in astonishment, & the world, & particularly her own sex (I speak it with shame) to censure. As if a woman ought not to be firm as well as gentle, energetic as well as yielding in her nature, strong minded as well as pure, & intellectual as well as amiable. Should not all these qualities be combined? And if they are so, what woman can smother these energies & those aspirations till their light shine no further than the fireside? Woman can be woman as the wife, the mother & yet as the Teacher & the Reformer. More than all should the mother be strongminded & energetic, firm & high souled, natural & developed intellectually as well as socially, that her children may wear the stamp of something that lives within itself. . ." (Sprauge 156-57)
From 1848 to 1852, Europe was convulsed by a series of Revolutions which all ultimately failed by 1852 with the restoration of either dictatorship or the reestablishment of conservative rule. The revolutions started in a part of Italy in 1848, but the real spark was in France in 1848. From there, as news spread, revolutions broke out in other parts of Italy, Prussia, Austria and the German Confederation. However, internal divisions based on nationalism and on a radical/liberal split soon weakened the revolutionaries. By 1852 conservatives had taken advantage of the weaknesses and regained power. In France, Napoleon Bonaparate's nephew, Louis Napoleon took power in a coup d'etat. |