Age Of Reform In America

American reform movements in the early to mid 1800’s strived at improving our developing society. America was growing larger, and with the expanding population, many new ideas sprang up. Conflicting opinions between the people of the United States caused the emergence of an Age of Reform, where people tried to change things such as the educational system and women’s rights. These movements were the result of our nation’s self-determination and interest in improving the society we live in.

Between the 1820’s and 1860’s, Americans were trying new things and promoting different ideas and ways of thinking. Once such idea is that of a utopian society. A utopian society, simple put, means a perfect society. There are many examples of experiments at utopian society in the 1800’s.

George Ripley endeavored to create one of the first utopian societies in West Roxberry, Massachusetts. The community was called Brook Farm, and was established in 1841. Everyone in the community shared labor and leisure time equally. Ripley believed that leisure was the most important step to understanding yourself. The problem with Brook Farm was that the residents ended up believing in a form of communism, despite its objective of being a community where the individual would be able to become ‘whole’. A fire late in 1847 caused the community to disband and separate. Brook Farm is important because not only was it one of the first utopian society experiments in the 1800’s, but it proved that people were confident about trying new things. Critics of Brook Farm said that the point of the community was nothing more than the desire to become better than other people. This demonstrates that (even though it failed) Brooke Farm was created solely for the purpose of bettering the way in which people lived.

In 1948, John Humphrey founded another utopian experiment in Oneida, New York. This was another important utopian society experiment in the 1800’s. In this society, children were raised by the whole community, and businesses were run by the whole community. In other words, everyone who lived there was part of one big family. The Oneida experiment grew fairly large over 30 years, including over 200 peopl...

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...forbade black education. Besides that, very little of the white population went to schools anyway. Establishing school systems in these areas was a tricky job. Despite problems in the South and West with education, America had grown into a more learned nation. Over 80% of the population (excluding the slavery population) were literate, compared with a much lower literacy rate prior to the 1800’s. Americans had once again worked hard in order to enhance their societies’ standards.

The Age of Reforms was a period in which many changes were made to improve the way in which people lived at the time. Utopian experiments were attempts at creating a flat out perfect sociological structure. Reforms in women’s rights made strides in making basic civil liberties available to not just men, but females as well. Lastly, reforms in the educational systems of America provided more hope for future generations by making our country a more intelligent nation. All of these accomplishments demonstrate how the Age of Reforms was a period in which America improved by leaps and bounds in the process of turning it into what we know it as today.