Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 430-456). / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / 456 leaves, bound ill. 29 cm

Frances Wright attempted to reform America between 1825 and 1839. Her activities were unlike any other for a woman of her time. In public lectures to audiences of men and women throughout the East and Midwest, she spoke on the evils of orthodox religion and advocated abolition, equal rights, and universal education for all people regardless of gender or class. In both action and thought, she challenged all notions of nineteenth-century womanhood. Wright's public career helps illuminate the history of antebellum American reform because it reflects the ferment and range of such activity.This study will demonstrate that ideology as a category of study is useful when examining nineteenth-century women in several interrelated contexts. Unlike previous studies examining her as a women's rights advocate, however, this is not a feminist interpretation. Wright's significance as a humanitarian is much larger than any emphasis she gave to women in her rhetoric. Part of her motivation, like her sisters in benevolence reform, involved Christianity and orthodox religion. But unlike most women of her time, Wright believed religion prevented the realization of republican values -- in particular, equality -- because the clergy perpetuated elements of theology scientific methods could not prove true. Intellectual development and social improvement could not occur, she boldly asserted, until Americans threw off religion's blanket of ignorance. Most Americans rejected Wright's denunciations of religion and calls for equality, but to some her message rang true. Her rhetoric planted in progressive women concepts about religious constraints on females and the possibilities of egalitarianism. These individuals would become leaders in the women's rights movement during the final decades of the century. / Department of History

Many religious leaders in the early 1900s were afraid of the immoral associations and repercussions of birth control. The Catholic Church and some Protestants never accepted contraception, or accepted it much later, but many mainline Protestants leaders did change their tune dramatically between the years of 1920 and 1931. This investigation seeks to understand how Margaret Sanger was able to use her rhetoric to move her reform from the leftist outskirts and decadent, sexual connotations into the mainstream of family-friendly, morally virtuous, and even conservative religious approval. Securing the approval of religious leaders subsequently provided the impetus for legal and medical acceptance by the late-1930s. Margaret Sanger used conferences, speeches, articles, her magazine (Birth Control Review), and several books to reinforce her message as she pragmatically shifted from the radical left closer to the center and conservatives. She knew the power of the churches to influence their members, and since the United States population had undeniably a Judeo-Christian base, this power could be harnessed in order to achieve success for the birth control movement, among the conservative medical and political communities and the public at large. Despite the clear consensus against birth control by all mainline Christian churches in 1920, including Roman Catholics and Protestants alike, the decade that followed would bring about a great divide that would continue to widen in successive decades. Sanger put forward many arguments in her works, but the ones which ultimately brought along the relatively conservative religious leaders were those that presented birth control not as a gender equity issue, but rather as a morally constructive reform that had the power to save and strengthen marriages; lessen prostitution and promiscuity; protect the health of women; reduce abortions, infanticide, and infant mortality; and improve the quality of life for children and families. Initially, many conservatives and religious leaders associated the birth control movement with radicals, feminists, prostitutes, and promiscuous youth, and feared contraception would lead to immorality and the deterioration of the family. Without the threat of pregnancy, conservatives feared that youth and even married adults would seize the opportunity to have sex outside of marriage. Others worried the decreasing size of families was a sign of growing selfishness and materialism. In response, Sanger promoted the movement as a way for conservatives to stop the rising divorce rates by strengthening and increasing marriages, and to improve the lives of families by humanely increasing the health and standard of living, for women and children especially. In short, she argued that birth control would not lead to deleterious consequences, but would actually improve family moral values and become an effective humanitarian reform. She recognized that both liberals and conservatives were united in hoping to strengthen the family, and so she emphasized those virtues and actively courted those same conservative religious leaders that had previously shunned birth control and the movement. Throughout the 1920s, she emphasized the ways in which birth control could strengthen marriages and improve the quality of life of women and children, and she effectively won over the relatively conservative religious leaders that she needed to bring about the movement’s public, medical, and political progress.