X-within-URL: http://www.gnbvoc.mec.edu/webquest/PPERRY3.htm
2ND GREAT AWAKENING & WESTWARD EXPANSION
1815-1850
This time period brought the young country through rapid social and economic change. This change brought with it regional and cultural tensions. Americans sought personal, social and economic improvements in their lives. A new middle class arose as people moved from rural to urban settings. In the Northeast, lives changed for girls and women as the factory system took hold. Lowell Mill Girls Americans also took aim at the problems resulting from rapid social change and women like Dorothea Dix left their mark on society. Women also began leaving their mark in the professions, more and more women began teaching and one courageous women, despite unbelieveable odds recieved a medical degree. Elizabeth Blackwell
Participation in the anti-slavery movement inspired many women to consider their own role in society. Some believed like Catharine Beecher that a women's place was in her duty to home and family. She wrote her down her thoughts in her Treatiste on Domestic Economy. Sarah Hale, in the meantime spent 40 years defining for millions of American women their proper sphere...refined, educated, moral, wholesome, tasteful, gentle and skillful homemakers. She did this through Godey's Lady's Book. While women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton took a more active role in the fight for equal rights for women. An important day came for women when Stanton and others issued the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention, in Seneca Falls, New York.
American pushed westward toward Texas, California and Oregon in search of new opportunities. The lives of the Native Americans were once more impacted by the movement of the white man. Thousands of settlers traveled west over the Oregon Trail to Oregon and California. Among them Narcissa Whitman who was the first white women to travel the Oregon Trail.