"(New Englanders) were among the most notable Christians in the nation at the time (particularly abolitionists). He does not explain this contradiction."

New England, by the mid-nineteenth century, was notorious for spawning many movements, that at the time, did not seem "Christian" to many.

Spiritualism- first appeared in the 1840s in the Burned-Over District of upstate New York.

Oneida Society- a utopian commune founded by John Humphrey Noyes in 1848 in Oneida, New York.

Free Love Movement- (also had links to abolitionist movements)- They viewed sexual freedom as a clear, direct expression of an individual's self-ownership, stressing women's rights since most sexual laws discriminated against women. A number of communities of a range of class backgrounds adopted free love ideas which sought to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, adultery, divorce, age of consent, and birth control.

Latter Day Saint movement- 1830, consisting of a community of believers in the western New York

Henry Ward Beecher, famous minister who, via the lecture circuit, advocated Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (publ. 1859), women's suffrage, temperance, abolition, etc.

Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield, Mass., in 1847 That year she gave her first lecture on woman's rights from the pulpit of her brother's church. The following year she became an agent for the Antislavery Society. It was still rare for a woman to speak in public, rarer still for one to speak on woman's rights. The Antislavery Society disliked having the two causes confused, and so a compromise was arrived at by which Stone spoke for abolition on weekends, leaving the rest of the week free for woman's rights.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer- a women's rights and temperance advocate. In 1851 she created the "Loose Bloomer" for womens comfort. Abolitionist women sometimes dressed in pants and smoked.

The list goes on and on.

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David Upton