Reform Movements

Antebellum Reform

The four decades preceding the Civil War witnessed an explosion of reform efforts in the United States. Fueled by the utopian spirit of both the American Revolution and the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening, tens of thousands of men and women during this period tried to improve their society in ways as diverse as ending slavery in the South, reforming Americans' dietary habits, and encouraging their countrymen not to drink. Yet, however diverse, most of these movements were preoccupied with defining an ideal relationship between the individual and society, and very often that ideal was conceptualized and promoted in terms of some perceived standard of “manly” behavior.

A new concept of masculinity that emphasized the liberty and rights of the individual emerged in the nineteenth century. With the trend toward extending voting rights to all white men and the ascendancy of a more profit-oriented economy (what historians call the “market revolution”), a cultural ideal of manhood emerged that defined men as self-interested participants in both the political arena and the economic marketplace. While this individualistic concept of manhood often created a sense of empowerment for some, for the society as a whole it was also a source of considerable social anxiety. Many feared that the social and economic changes of the period were eroding the bonds that held American society together. They worried that new understandings of manhood were not indicative of increased individual liberty, but instead promoted self-interested acquisitiveness and civic irresponsibility.

Many of the reform movements of the period were therefore directed at creating a sense of social stability. These movements usually did not seek to reverse the social and cultural changes of the market revolution; instead, they worked [Page 388]to mitigate anxieties about those changes. Addressing fears about the erosion of older mechanisms of social control, several movements offered a vision of masculine identity based upon self-control. For example, by building organizations where men pledged to give up alcohol and eat only healthy foods, temperance societies and dietary reform movements such as Grahamism (influenced by the health reformer and minister Sylvester Graham) provided reassuring evidence that American men—particularly entrepreneurial, middle-class men—balanced their pursuit of self-interest with voluntary self-restraint.

Abolitionist activists also celebrated self-control. While many sincerely considered slavery a momentous injustice, the abolitionist critique of slavery also functioned as a symbolic repository of all the perceived problems of America's increasingly fragmented society. In this view, slavery—not American society as a whole or its entrepreneurial middle-class men— was economically exploitative, driven by greed and aggressiveness. In contrast, the ideal man in abolitionist ideology was not driven by self-interest, but was restrained by his moral sense and religious beliefs. Although attitudes toward market capitalism varied widely between different reform movements, the vision of self-restrained manhood promoted by antebellum reformers helped ease concerns about the effects of social atomization during the period.

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