Why Did I Never Realize How Cool the 19th Century Was?

Before I took this class, I wasn’t aware of how much revolutionary social change took place during the 19^th century. That’s a little odd, because I knew that this was when the civil war happened and when the first wave of feminism began. Before reading the books for this class, however, I hadn’t connected the two movements in my head, learned about any other attempts at social change, like Transcendentalism, that took place during the 19^th century, or thought about the significance of the fact that several huge social movements began around the same time.

The readings for this class gave me a sense of how many people in the 19^th century not only wanted things to change, but pushed for that change through literature. Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson wanted us to live in nature with more awareness so that we could learn to respect it and each other; Jacobs, Douglass, and countless other abolitionists wanted to see slavery end and tried to bring this about by showing that slaves are people, too; Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrated the dangers of the rest cure and tried to communicate that entrapping and limiting women only leads to suffering; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson synthesized various parts of these statements and condensed them into poems.

Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and Feminism are very diverse movements, but at base, I think they are all organized around similar principles. Each movement points to the essential humanity—and by extension the right to equal and decent treatment—of its members. I think this is true of Transcendentalism even thought it didn’t campaign for one specific group (though Thoreau was definitely anti-slavery). One of the things that I took away from Transcendentalist writing was the belief that we’re all equally capable of establishing our own relationships with God in our own individual ways. To me, this implies that we’re all equal, because we all have equal access to God and receive equal amounts of his love. This seems like a very powerful argument for respecting every one’s right to live the way they want to, and to abolish oppressive hierarchies.

I’ve always thought of the last half of the 20^th century, particularly the ‘60s, as the revolutionary moment in American history. And while it’s true that this was a period of huge social change, I think that the 19^th century was equally important. I also don’t think that the ‘60s could possibly have happened without the writers, artists, and political figures who started these 19^th century revolutions.