WW: CH 17 Documents

     The first document of this chapter is the testimony of a female factory worker by the name of Elizabeth Bentley. I read the first couple lines and immediately knew what was going on in this little interview session. For some odd reason I instantly started imagining workers being trapped on a floor up in a building on fire. As I progressed through the document I found more and more difficult to read. I started feeling angry because the owners of the factory should have been more thoughtful in how they treated their workers; however, I then realized that the only thing that the factory owners wanted was to be making a profit and lose as little as possible. They had no intention on protecting their "employees" because to them they were expendable. It absolutely disgust me how when we got the testimony of the Mill Owner how he only mentioned how drastic his losses would be should he cut his business hours down to ten.
     The second document is a song about Weavers and how due to industrialization they were left pretty much jobless and how they had to cope with that. I could definitely sense the despair in the voice of the lyricist. Due to large manufacturing companies these really skilled people were no longer skilled in the eyes of these large company men. They often ended up selling their looms to the bigger companies.
     The third document is trying to justify the actions of the middle class and above. It goes on to say that although their civilization is very much well Christian, that the poor class are resembling "savage tribes". I find this insulting to the poor class. They are working their hearts out day in and day out just to put food on the table and here comes this guy completely trashing what they do. If it weren't for those "savage tribes" he wouldn't be at home with enough space to himself and all the food at his disposal. So to close this out, I completely disagree with their argument that the wealthy are not to blame, because they are certainly responsible for the vast majority of it.

Chapter 16 Documents

     The first primary source was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. For one, I immediately found myself comparing it to the Constitution of the United States. The first specific right helped solidify my urge to compare the two since it states: Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. As I read through the document, I did not come across anything that granted any shape or form of power to women. In every specific right that they mention, the one I mentioned above as my example, they specifically, whether intentional or not, use the word "man". They never even mention women when you read through the document. Moving forward, the document covers essentially the same rights as the Constitution.

     The second document goes on the attack from the start. I think the fact that it mentions that the"hatred we feel for the Peninsula is greater than the sea separating us from it" is powerful in itself. It shows how desperate people were to gain their independence from the countries that had originally colonized the Americas. It goes on to mention that the European nations, in this case Spain, are the ones responsible for all the suffering that people are having to go through in the Americas and that that's the reason why America fights with such "defiance". I find this part particularly interesting because it really portrayed the extreme measures people were willing to go through. This was literally a slap to the face to all of Europe saying, we don't want you running our lives. We are far away from you. We want to rule ourselves.

     The third document is entitled "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" I immediately thought that there was a definite purpose behind this document. The document could not have put it in better words. "a day that reveals to him...the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim." There was a bit of hypocrisy behind that holiday. The people of light skin color were celebrating freedom and the beauty behind it, yet they were guilty of owning slaves themselves and stripping from them the rights that they themselves had worked so hard to achieve. It was by no means fair at all. If anything it added insult to injury to the African slaves. 

     The fourth document finally brings up the women who were not allowed their basic rights. Elizabeth Stanton makes really good points such as the fact that the "responsibilities of life rest[s] equally on man and woman". She also uses very good evidence such as being a free human being and being able to live their lives just as freely as men do.

WW: Chapter 16 (pages 798-811)

     This part of the chapter explains how there were small revolutions occurring throughout Europe in the 1800's. As a result of these small revolutions, social equality was vastly improved and foreign rule seemed to be a thing of the past. I feel as if these revolutions unified people who shared the same beliefs. This is why equality had such a huge emphasis and took a big part of the reason as to why these revolutions occurred in the first place. 

     Something that ended around this time period was slavery. It was abolished between 1780 and 1890, for the most part. A reason why slavery was abolished was due to the fact that Enlightenment thinkers were pretty critical of it. They believed that it was immoral to have someone be someone else's property. Two very specific examples being the Americans and the French. They tried to address the fact that anyone who was identified with the term "slave" lacked the right to liberty, as well as the right to equality. It was not just the almighty and powerful who thought abolishing slavery was necessary, religious groups, such as Protestant evangelicals, also shared the same beliefs and became extremely vocal when it came to the issue of slavery. People also believed that slavery was out of date. However, in some cases very drastic measures were taken to abolish slavery. For example, in the United States it took the Civil War to settle the dispute between the Union and the Confederates and the whole situation revolving around slavery. However, just because the abolition of slavery took place doesn't necessarily mean that the living conditions for the people who used to live under slavery improved. 

     The chapter goes on to explain how people gained a sense of nationalism. People bought into the idea of belonging to one nation, hence the term nationalism. Before, people had thought that they only belonged to things such as clans, villages, or legions, as opposed to one entire nation. As people started to embrace nationalism and began to be enlightened by things such as science, religion soon started to lose its grip on the control it had held on people for so long. Nationalism was its own renaissance for the cultural identity of people across the world. By the time that the nineteenth century came around, nationalism was a force to be reckoned with. This fueled the tensions between European nations. They ended up fighting over things such as colonies across the world. Another example would be World War I.  

     The chapter also went on to talk about Feminist movements. European Enlightenment thinkers were often questioning the belief that women were somehow inferior to men. The first organized feminist meeting was a conference that was held in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.