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5 - Protestant and Catholic Critiques of Family and Women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Wherever Freedom is found, there is woman emancipated.
Thomas Bangs Thorpe, 1855Amid the kaleidoscopic changes in the middle third of the nineteenth century, most Americans – Protestant and Catholic alike – could agree that the family was an institution of central importance to state and society. Edward Norris Kirk, a Presbyterian clergyman, argued in 1848 that families were building blocks of the state. “Four millions or more of these little groups are scattered from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast,” he contended, and “they are the nation in miniature; for, as they are, the nation will be.” Those effects that rightly shaped the family, put simply, would elevate the nation. Archbishop John Hughes, writing five years before, agreed. The family, he observed, closely mirroring Kirk’s phrasing, “is in itself a State,” where there existed “form, dominion and order.”
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- Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America , pp. 176 - 219Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011