Cult Of True Womanhood Analysis

Shoshana Charlot
POLS 3837
October 8, 2015
Midterm Exam
1.
Civil rights and legal mobilization movements all start from a root. The root being a grievance in which a person’s fundamental rights are being compromised whether it be a right that is explicitly written in the constitution or an enumerated right. The Fundamental rights are rights that are recognized by the Supreme Court as being fair and legal. The fundamental rights are illustrated in the first amendment. As it reads “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances”.
The evangelical revivals of the antebellum era brought more women into reform movements because there was an emphasis on how woman were thought to be faithful and had a higher standard for morality. This outlook of woman during this time benefitted middle-class woman the most so it caused them to organize the ‘Cult of True Womanhood ‘. This organization of woman were thought that because of their depth of morality that they should spread their loving and nurturing instincts to society as a whole. The Cult of True Womanhood first to began to organize themselves by doing charity work such as feeding the hungry widows, protecting working woman from vice, and by trying to rehabilitate prostitutes and by helping to reform prisons and insane asylums. As stated in the essay The Case for the Reform Antecedents for Women’s Rights Movement by Allison M. Parker “All this work moved woman from the domestic into the public, political sphere.” The work that these women where doing brought them outside of their home into society takes steps to create reform. These woman were found in prisons, insane asylums and even prostitution houses. The woman in this organization felt that a major societal change would be possible without the right to
In the book “The Hollow Hope” by Gerald Rosenberg discusses notion that there are two major schools of thought and the way that courts should view their powers. The Dynamic court which is a court that is powerful and a court that can create social change. The Constrained Court is a court that is powerless and cannot create social change because of lack of power and influence. The Constrained Court is a court that cannot create social change because it is constrained by three ideas. The first constraint is limited by the constraint of constitutional rights. The restricted nature of constitutional rights prevents the courts from effectively acting on social reform claims and would prevent change because not all claims can be looked at through a constitutional lens when emotional and mainstream opinion are a factor, and it is important for new rights to be built upon old ones rather than disregarded completely. The second constraint is that the court doesn’t lacks interdependence from the other branches of government to produce social change. The decision of the courts can be overturned by congress and congress can change the legal structure. The third constraint of the court is that the courts do not have the appropriate tools to create social change through the development of policy change. In order for social change to happen within these courts political elites must support the stance if not it will be