Page 318 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Read the Document Lucretia Mott, Declaration of Sentiments and
resolutions (1848) 12.1

12.2

12.3

a MoTheR’S MoveMenT elizabeth Cady stanton, a leader of the women’s rights movement, reared seven children.
in addition to her pioneering work, especially for woman suffrage, she also lectured on family life and child care.

to remove her one blemish, a birthmark. His greatest novels, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), probed New England’s Puritan past and the
shadows it cast on Hawthorne’s own age. By dwelling on original sin as a psychological
reality, Hawthorne told his contemporaries that they could never escape from guilt and
evil. One had to accept the world as an imperfect place. Although he did not openly
attack humanitarian reformers and cosmic optimists, Hawthorne’s parables and alle-
gories implicitly questioned the assumptions of pre–Civil War reform.
One does not have to agree with Hawthorne’s pessimistic view of the human con-
dition to acknowledge that perfectionist reformers promised more than they could
deliver. Revivals could not make all men like Christ; temperance could not solve all
social problems; and abolitionist agitation could not end slavery peacefully. The con-
sequences of perfectionist efforts were often far different from what their proponents
expected. In defense of the reformers, however, one could argue that Hawthorne’s
skepticism and fatalism were a prescription for doing nothing about intolerable evils.
If the reform impulse was long on inspirational rhetoric but short on durable, practi-
cal achievements, it did at least disturb the complacent and opportunistic surface of
American life and open the way to necessary changes. Nothing would improve unless
people were willing to dream of improvements.

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