Antebellum Reform Essay Back in 1850, there were many social, political, and economic issues in the society. Women didn’t have any rights and were pretty much their husbands’ and/or father’s property, they were paid close to nothing for working long, hard shifts, and they couldn’t be independent in any way; that is until they were allowed to join the workforce. African Americans were still slaves, they had absolutely no rights, weren’t allowed to get an education, and they could be torn from their family at any moment without a say. If they were sold to a slave owner without their family, there wasn’t anything they could do about it. And only certain people were allowed to go to school. In order to be a student, your family needed to have money and you had to be a white male. As a woman in the 1850s, it was a very difficult lifestyle for me. All I could do was feed my three kids and husband, clean the house everyday, even if it was already spotless, and do other house chores while watching the kids. All I wanted was to get out of that house, maybe …show more content…
My neighbor on the other hand wasn’t lucky like me. She was African American and during this time, being an African American or a female made it nearly impossible to get an education. I didn’t think it was fair at the time, and when I look back, I still don’t think it was fair, that women and colored people weren’t allowed to get an education. It’s their right as an American but with white males in charge, that didn’t happen. It didn’t matter where you lived in the U.S, if you didn’t have money and you weren’t a white male, you couldn’t get a good education, if one at all. Horace Mann started the movement for education to be more public, rather than having a limited amount of people getting an education because they didn’t have enough money or the right skin color or were born the other