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Reading Mary Ryan's, "Civil Society as a Democratic Practice," reminded me of my days in my high school American Public Policy class.   Civic Engagement was a buzz word of the course, and the power of volunteer and community organizations was emphasized in our unit on modern, local democracy.   Mary Ryan brought me back to this concept by taking it back to the first quarter of the 19th century, showing that associations have been important to American democracy since the early years of our existence as a nation, not only in modern times.   Ryan claims that, "sustained, associated action is an essential condition for, and component of, democratic politics"(560).   This idea is followed by the claim that civil society doesn't always promote democracy, but that the ability for people to associate themselves with social groups allows the combining of like ideas to together advocate for a way of living, and, over time, to alter the political system.  I found it interesting that the press played such a large role in expanding the effects of social organizations, by reporting on their events.   It was in this way that the groups were able to find many members and draw support for their ideas within a larger population.  I also was impressed with the effects these associations had on those societal groups without suffrage, including women and African-Americans.  Associations provided them with the outlets to gather together in support of unpopular ideas, eventually transforming them into some of our history's most important grassroots and/or political movements, including those for abolition and women's suffrage.   As we learned in studying the Second Great Awakening many of these organizations sprang up out of the Protestant religious movements and the push for using religion to make a difference in the community, but Mary Ryan shows that these associations went far beyond ties to the Second Great Awakening and went on to create movements and social changes of their own.