. “As the sizes of families shrank, the demands on women correspondingly diminished…a women who delayed pregnancy for several years…had a chance to gain experience in an adult role other than a mother.” ( Lunardini 30). By acquiring contraception awareness women were freer to concentrate on their own issues, not their children’s. Most women were fully aware and practicing birth control methods by the civil war. Having less children provided women with move time to focus on supporting women’s rights.Along with these social successes, women, notably Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were active advocators of temperance. Although temperance and prohibition of alcohol may seem political in origin, upon further investigation it had a clearly social motivation. Many women who helped the temperance movement were those who suffered abuse from their drunken husbands. “ With the overwhelming majority of alcohol abusers being men, and with virtually no legal protection…it seemed a natural consequence, then, for women to become the primary agents for change and reform.” (Hanmer 24) This movement, greatly dominated by women, had a few successes and gave them a point from which to jump beyond themselves in the future. They were able to persuade Congress to pass law that forbid the sale of alcohol to Indians. An even greater step in the right direction was in 1851 when Maine became the first state to issue a prohibition on alcohol, following its example about twelve states did the same.(Hanmer 23-26) Without the support and hard-work of the women advocators, the temperance movement would not have been adopted so quickly nor would it have been so successful.In addition to the temperance movement, many women gave their support to the abolition movement. Even when women offered their help in the abolition movement they were sometimes turned away. At the 1840 anti-slavery convention in Lon...
