Women and Reform in a New England Community, 1815-1860

As part of the ongoing reevaluation of the prehistory of the women\u27s movement, Carolyn Lawes analyzes the organized social activism of the mostly middle-class, urban, white women of Worcester, Massachusetts, and finds that they were at the center of community life and leadership. Neither frontier nor densely urban, Worcester encountered the stresses common to so many communities in the Northeast during the first half of the nineteenth century. It was also the site of the first two national women\u27s rights conventions in the 1850s.Arguing against the long-accepted paradigm of separate public and private spheres for women\u27s lives, Lawes defines and describes what women were able to do and why, and seeks to reinterpret American women\u27s history. [From Jet.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/history_books/1029/thumbnail.jp