During the early nineteenth century, women participated in numerous efforts to improve women''s status, defend their interests, and increase their rights. Educators, such as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Catharine Beecher, promoted advanced training for women in female academies and seminaries. Thousands of women in the 1830s and 1840s joined moral reform societies, organized to end licentiousness, seduction, and prostitution. Female temperance societies strove to save abused wives and families from drunken spouses. Individual reformers …showed first 75 words of 1584 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1584 total…w Deal - the circle of women around Eleanor Roosevelt - came from the reform-minded wing of the women''s movement. Like Labor Secretary Frances Perkins and Mary W. Dewson, head of the Women''s Division of the Democratic party, they had experience in settlements, women''s clubs, and social welfare, and they opposed the National Woman''s party position on an era. Often staunch defenders of women''s interests, they described themselves as reformers, not feminists. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**