Inequality in eighteenth century was somewhat perpetrated in the name of religion. Immigrants left Europe to avoid religious persecution based on their beliefs. The Protestants were the ones who left the Europe for new land so they can pursue their religion freely in the new land. Thus many migrants when they came to new land formed entire communities and towns on religious lines. Initially many towns were regarded as bastion of one religious group or another. The entire localities were unofficially restricted to members of that particular group.

The consequences and characteristics of the Great Awakening is what made this religious reform great. The most important ramification was the religious ideology that helped spark the United States Revolution. The revivalist’s ideology had an egalitarian attitude that was similar to the political ideas and beliefs of the American revolutionary leaders. For example, “all men are created equal.” The revivalist’s ministers preached to a mass audience that was composed of people from all social ranks.

The Second Great Awakening, which began around 1800, stressed personal perfection and America's mission to pursue social perfection, and fueled anti-slavery passions. It came at a time when America was made safe for a spiritual democracy. Religious revivals, some lasting months and involving hundreds of thousands of people, sprang up on the American frontier, what is now the Midwest. People spoke in tongues, were slain in the spirit, claimed miraculous healing powers, and participated in numerous forms of socially sanctioned trance behavior. During this period, Christian denominations such as the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists gained their largest number of converts.

The years between 1794 and 1832 saw thousands of women and men received into membership in churches across the United States, marking an end to a drought that had left much of the religious landscape desiccated during the Revolutionary years and after.

Nathan Hatch (1989) refers to the first quarter of the 19th century as the "democratization" of American Christianity (still overwhelmingly Protestant). He notes that the post-Revolutionary period produced a "crisis of authority in popular culture." Social change contested the relatively fixed character of the colonial social order. Enlightenment and classical republican ideals were being challenged by "vulgar democracy and materialistic individualism," and there were "challenges to any authority that did not spring from volitional allegiance" (Hatch 1989: 23). Crises of confidence in established authorities seemed to call for fundamental social reform.
Members of an emerging entrepreneurial class but also those of other stations and callings, were caught up in intensified religious expression. They experienced conversions, joined organizations designed to promote a host of benevolent causes, and swelled church rolls. They were Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, and together they comprised a movement that historians in retrospect have called the Second Great Awakening.

Until the nineteenth century, racist and sexist assumptions about the status of Blacks and white women living in America went largely unchallenged. Although Blacks, and to a lesser extent white women, had previously emitted scattered signs of protest, an organized movement did not emerge until this time. The crusade for women's rights evolved out of the fight for abolitionism and established itself as a separate movement when a group of female abolitionists were made conscious of their own inferior legal status by the abolitionist movement itself.

Society's refusal to recognize the political rights of Blacks and women hinged upon these groups' inability to exercise civil rights and their subordination to the political community of white males. Men like Douglass fought for liberty. Frederick Douglas was one of the most important African American leaders of the 19th Century. He was a man who spoke and wrote with an unsurpassed eloquent on the issues confronting the American people during his life. His commentaries ranged from the abolition of slavery to women's rights, From the Civil War to racial lynching, from American patriotism to Black Nationalism.
Through to his death in 1895, Douglass continued to fight for the rights of minorities (i.e. 15th Amendment) and was honored for his distinguished career by serving in several different governmental administrative rolls.
The end of slavery and the passage of the married women's property acts began to erode this justification for denying political rights to Blacks and women. However, the transition from arguing for civil rights to arguing for political rights was complicated by two factors: first, in reality, the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and various married women's property laws did not guarantee civil rights to all citizens regardless of their race or gender; and second, due to the presence of racism and sexism in American society, unmarried white women and Black freedmen had always been denied political rights, even though they had previously enjoyed almost all the civil rights of citizenship. Therefore, the movement to attain political equality for Blacks and women first had to focus on securing civil rights, and second on overcoming the forces of racism and sexism in society.
During the period immediately following the Civil War, the status of women's civil rights improved in some respects, but deteriorated in others. For the first time, laws were passed protecting married women’s earnings from their husbands' debts. However, other state laws advancing married women's civil rights were actually repealed or diluted after the Civil War.

Unlike the slave, the woman -- at least in theory -- had voluntarily entered into the contract by which she ceded her rights to another human being, her husband. Like any other contract, the marriage license was regulated completely by state law, and the Federal Government had no power to dictate its terms. However, the voluntary nature of this contractual relationship was somewhat illusory. Economic necessity pressured women to marry, regardless of whether they wanted a family. Institutions of higher learning denied admission to women, and even if a woman did become competent in a profession, the state had the power to deny her a license to practice. Most of the jobs available to women involved low-paying, menial labor. A single woman could only be economically secure if she came from a very wealthy family, or if she were a well provided-for widow. Women's struggles for political rights thus occurred in a context in which almost all women were bound to a marriage contract.
The blacks and women had a combined fate and the only redeeming factor for the women was that they were white. The black women suffered more suppression than any one as they ere treated like chattels and animals with no sense or thought of their own. Similarly the slaves faced the problem. They had little or no economic and social value and facing the powerful masters became frightening due to the future consequences. The two movements-based on races and gender were invariably linked, I suggest to the social values as initiated by the society. As society changed from agricultural to industrial progress was made and slowly individual rights began to take meaning.

The anti alcohol, or temperance, movement was created in the early nineteenth century by physicians, ministers, and large employers concerned about the drunkenness of workers and servants. By the mid 1830s temperance had become a mass movement of the middle Class. Temperance was not, as is sometimes thought, the campaign of rural backwaters; rather, temperance was on the cutting edge of social reform and was closely allied with the antislavery and women’s rights movements. Always very popular, temperance remained the largest enduring middle-class movement of the nineteenth century.

The temperance campaign was devoted to convincing people that alcoholic drink in any form was evil, dangerous, and destructive. Throughout the nineteenth century, temperance supporters insisted that alcohol slowly but inevitably destroyed the moral character and the physical and mental health of all who drank it. Temperance supporters regarded alcohol the way people today view heroin: as an inherently addicting substance.