he typical (male) Southerner as "a sort of domestic dictator from infancy; the first notion he acquires in life is that he was born to command" (223), as well as the "even cruder settlers of the West" (223).
Nevertheless, increasingly widespread consciousness of what constitutes a good society was taking hold in America by the 1830s. "Cities," says Wiltse, "were being cleaned up literally, by methods that were a distinct improvement over the old one of pigs roaming the streets to eat the garbage householders tossed out indiscriminately" (136). Temperance was another prominent theme of reformists. Slavery and abolitionism were most prominent in the discourse of reform, and nascent feminism lurked in the margins of abolitionism, sometimes overlapping and converging with it. Wiltse continues:
Although the antislavery crusade, by the middle 1830's, had absorbed much of the energy and zeal of the reformers, [] there was enough left over to keep . . . women like Frances Wright and Margaret Fuller fully involved with the 'rights of
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