The Appeal of Female Moral Reform, Introduction

What Was the Appeal of Moral Reform to Antebellum Northern Women?

Executive Committee, probably of early
New York Female Moral Reform Society, ca. 1850
From: Flora L. Northrup, The Record of a Century, 1834-1934
(New York: American Female Guardian Society and
Home for the Friendless, 1934), p. 17.

Original editorial project by:
Daniel S. Wright
State University of New York at Binghamton
March 1999

"Moral reform" was a campaign in the 1830s and '40s to abolish licentiousness, prostitution, and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market. The documents in this project date from 1835 to 1841, the period of the moral reform movement's most rapid expansion as well as the decade that preceded the sharpest fertility decline. Most of the documents are taken from New York and Boston moral reform newspapers.[1]

This editorial project addresses a set of related questions: Why did the moral reform movement appeal so strongly to rural and small-town northern women in the 1830s and '40s? What concerns did the movement help these women articulate, and what means did it offer them to act on those concerns, so that by 1841, some 50,000 women had gathered themselves into 616 local moral reform societies?[2]

The documents are divided into three parts. Out of the mass of moral reform propaganda, certain themes emerge in the form of a set of affirmations and negations broadly acceptable to northern evangelicals.

The documents in Part A (documents 1-10) illustrate five of the arguments that were key to the shaping of moral reform discourse. They were intended to galvanize action by articulating the aspirations of white northern women who sought to shape a society--what we now call a middle class culture--in which women's contributions were valued and their rights protected. There are two documents for each argument.

Documents 11-13 in Part B illustrate the urban leadership's explicit appeal to two groups of women--married and the yet-to-be-married young. The urban leadership of moral reform envisioned the local auxiliary society as an alliance of old and young, the married and those in the marriage market. Studies of the composition of the parent society leadership and of local auxiliaries show that the cause drew in women of all age groups and marital statuses. This age diversity distinguished moral reform from earlier female benevolent societies and those who sought to reclaim prostitutes, which had primarily consisted of older women.[3]

Part C (documents 14-21) presents eight documents that highlight moral reform's varied activities, both those urged by the parent societies and those actually undertaken by local societies. Female moral reform attracted middle class women in the North not only by advancing compelling arguments but by offering an effective program of action. In this respect, moral reform anticipated the pan-Protestant "Do Everything" approach of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union in the 1880s and '90s. (See "How Did the Reform Agenda of the Minnesota Woman's Christian Temperance Union Change between 1878 and 1917?" another editorial project on this website.)

Much of the work carried on by the parent societies was specifically urban--visitation in poor neighborhoods, an employment service, group residences for single working women, work with sailors--not things that local, rural auxiliaries could emulate. Much of the work at the local level was institutional maintenance--building up the membership and drumming up public support. But the core of moral reform activity was a program of individual and concerted action related to sexual behavior--something that both urban and rural activists could pursue.

* * *

Moral reform was the first social movement in the United States to consist primarily of women. Like abolitionism and the temperance movement in these years, moral reform attracted the support of thousands of men and women from New England to the Old Northwest. Most people who affiliated with these reform movements were part of "The Second Great Awakening"--a religious movement that emphasized the power of human agency when released from the bondage of sin.[4]

What distinguished moral reform from other movements was not only its focus on sexuality, but the extent to which women ran the movement. Female numerical predominance was nothing new in churches, revivals, and benevolent associations during the antebellum period. But moral reform was the first reform movement to become almost exclusively the cause of women.

Although most moral reform activists were members of the Congregational and New School Presbyterian churches, in many ways moral reform became a pan-Protestant movement that functioned independently of ministerial control.

Moral reform as a women's movement began in 1834 with the formation of the New York Female Moral Reform Society (hereafter, NYFMRS) as an auxiliary to the male American Society for Promoting the Observance of the Seventh Commandment. The guiding light behind both organizations was the Rev. John R. McDowall, an anti-vice crusader whose exposé of prostitution in New York City had earlier earned him a great deal of notoriety.

McDowall and his followers had come to believe vice could not be ended by trying to reclaim prostitutes. The goal, they were now convinced, must be prevention, through a national campaign to raise the standard of public morals and create new institutions that offered employment alternatives to the young women who were streaming into the city--hence the formation of the Seventh Commandment Society and its female auxiliary. The work of reclaiming fallen women was left to the New York Female Benevolent Society, whose organization McDowall had overseen in 1832.[5]

Not long after these developments in New York, a similarly concerned group organized the Boston Female Moral Reform Society in 1835. As in New York, this initiative was preceded by a one-man anti-vice crusade. Rev. Joseph A. Whitmarsh had come to Boston to carry on what McDowall had begun in New York. Even more of a maverick reformer than McDowall, he did not call for or personally facilitate the formation of the Boston women's society, though he did applaud it in the pages of his paper, the Illuminator.[6]

By the mid-1830s, then, there were two urban moral reform societies seeking support from women in the countryside. Rivalry for the allegiance of auxiliary societies in New England led to such friction between the New York and Boston leaders that they changed the names of their respective organizations. In a bid for regional identity, the Boston society in 1838 became the New England Female Moral Reform Society (hereafter, NEFMRS), while New York, laying claim to be the national organization, in 1839 renamed itself the American Female Moral Reform Society (AFMRS).[7]

The two societies laid out a program encompassing both urban outreach work and a nationwide campaign to reform sexual norms and behavior. In the city, the leadership undertook an ever-expanding mission to the working poor and destitute.

At first, "visiting committees" of hired women missioners visited slum districts, and "offices of direction" placed young women in domestic service. Later, the New York and Boston societies experimented with outplacement of street children in rural homes and opened residences and industrial training schools for single working women. Many of these and other programs lasted well into the twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the urban leadership published moral reform newspapers not only to publicize the urban mission work but to promulgate moral reform principles. In 1835 the NYFMRS took over McDowall's Journal, renaming it the Advocate of Moral Reform, and in 1838 the BFMRS began publishing the Friend of Virtue. Through these papers, and also through tracts, traveling agents, and summer visits by officers of the parent bodies, auxiliary societies throughout the Northeast were summoned to organize and put moral reform into action.

Four fundamental forces promoted the growth of the moral reform movement: the separation of church and state, which greatly empowered the female laity; the emergence of new middle-class norms of gender identity; the transition from traditional to modern strategies of family formation; and a dramatic decline in fertility rates.

The first two factors worked closely together. State legislatures began to "disestablish" churches in 1776, and by 1830 most ministers were funded by voluntary contributions from the laity rather than taxation. This development increased the power of the laity, and since women predominated among the laity, it also increased the power of women. Many, though by no means all, ministers began to call upon women to exercise forms of social power unknown to eighteenth-century women.[8]

The early history of the moral reform movement exemplified this process. For example, the Rev. Beriah Green declared at the NYFMRS organizational meeting in 1834,

Woman alone can make [promiscuous man] tremble like a criminal on the gallows. Woman must take the lead in this cause. With you, it remains to say whether licentiousness shall still triumph over the wrecks of female virtue, or hide its head forever.

Responding eagerly to this challenge, the female organizers of the society asserted that they were undertaking a "radical reform" which "can never be effected without the co-operation of woman. Here . . . her influence may be most powerful and efficacious. She may wield a power that can be wielded by no one else."[9]

New middle-class norms of gender identity also empowered women in new ways. These norms began to emerge around 1820 as the numbers and influence of middle-class people increased throughout American society. As women developed a loyalty to larger middle-class goals--such as the promotion of self-discipline and an individualistic work ethic--they began to exercise significant new forms of power, particularly in the home. For example, as men's work shifted to locations outside the home, the significance and value of women's work as mothers became an identifying mark of middle-class identity, according women a "separate sphere" of autonomous authority within the home.[10]

This new gender ideology gave women power unknown to their mothers and grandmothers, yet in a world in which women possessed almost no personal or civil rights, including the right to claim their own wages, their ability to challenge the power of men remained distinctly limited.[11] By studying women's participation in moral reform societies, we can see how they sought to increase women's personal and civil rights by redefining what was acceptable middle-class behavior.

Two additional transitions deepened and extended the changes associated with religious disestablishment and the rise of the middle-class. Between 1770 and 1830 a fundamental shift occurred in the process by which new families were formed. And beginning around 1800 birth rates began to decline.

Changes in the process by which families were formed made young women especially vulnerable in the marriage market around 1800. Before 1770, traditional practices, such as marriage-in-birth-order, had given parents a substantial amount of control over their children's choices of marriage partners. In the revolutionary war period, however, a more mobile and more commercially-oriented society disrupted parental management of courtship. In the much more chaotic marriage market at the end of the eighteenth century, as many as one in three brides was pregnant at marriage, a dramatic rise from the rate of one in ten who were pregnant at marriage in the beginning of the century.[12]

Historians have not studied the effects of such a widespread incidence of premarital pregnancy on the courtship practices of young women, but since the proportion of births outside of marriage did not rise, we know that pregnancy was soon followed by marriage. We can assume that many of these pregnant brides were happily marrying the marriage partner of their choice. But the phenomenal popularity of seduction and betrayal themes in contemporary fiction--seen, for example, in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791)--suggests that many young women could identify with the possibility of being abandoned by their lovers and forced to wed quickly whomever would have them. In a context in which marriageable women were no longer protected by their parents but had not yet evolved effective strategies of self-defense, predatory male sexuality became more visible and more problematic.[13]

Women in moral reform societies helped forge a new middle-class ideal of sexual abstinence before marriage--a strategy that protected women against predatory male sexuality and gave women more control over their own bodies while they searched for a mate. By 1860 this new Victorian ethic was so well established that premarital pregnancy rates had returned to the low levels of the 1740s.[14] But in the 1830s that new ethic was just emerging, and women in the moral reform movement constituted its vanguard. For young people to succeed in finding marriage partners, something had to replace the moral oversight of family and church; that something became self-discipline. Female moral reform gave public voice to this sexual and personal revolution.

Women in cities and farming villages from the eastern seaboard to the upper Midwest responded enthusiastically to the appeal of moral reform. By 1838, just four years after its founding, the New York society had grown to 361 auxiliary societies with 20,000 members and 16,500 subscribers to its paper, and two years later the New England group claimed 53 auxiliaries and 2,100 subscribers.

To be sure, these figures were dwarfed by those of the temperance and antislavery movements: in 1835 the American Temperance Society reported 1.5 million members in 23 state societies and some 8,000 local auxiliaries, while in 1838 the American Anti-Slavery Society had grown to 1,346 auxiliaries.[15]

But while the temperance movement in this era was overwhelmingly male and the anti-slavery movement was predominantly male, moral reform had become the nation's first explicitly female social movement. Not only was the movement comprised of women and led by women; it offered many mainstream, middle-class women their first opportunity to venture into the public arena and agitate for social change on behalf of women. Men's moral reform, meanwhile, dwindled to insignificance. By 1840 the Seventh Commandment Society, having changed its name to the American Moral Reform Society and then the American Society for the Promotion of Christian Morals, existed only as a paper organization.[16]

Members of female moral reform societies pledged themselves to cultivate habits of personal purity, train their children in the same, and exclude male sexual predators from their company. When these individual efforts produced limited results, the parent societies called upon their members to submit petitions to their respective state legislatures, urging that seduction be made a crime.

Although NEFMRS petitioners in Massachusetts were able to obtain only a rather pointless law against abduction in 1845, New York petitioners were more successful. There the petition campaign lasted ten years, finally obtaining the passage of an effective anti-seduction law in 1848.[17]

The New York campaign began in the fall of 1838, drawing on the power of its numerous auxiliaries throughout the state to petition the state legislature to criminalize seduction and prostitution. Auxiliaries annually flooded the legislature with thousands of signatures on petition forms supplied by the parent society. Year after year, proposed legislation came from an enthusiastic judiciary committee to the floor of the Assembly, only to be defeated there or in the upper chamber. Finally in 1848, it passed, through the tactic of dividing the legislation into two parts--an anti-abduction bill which outlawed the hiring of unmarried women into prostitution and an anti-seduction bill which made extramarital intercourse with an unmarried, chaste female a misdemeanor.[18]

In the minds of female moral reformers, the logic driving their demand for a legal remedy was compelling. While temperance activists were debating the merits of moral suasion as opposed to legal coercion, women in moral reform saw no such conflict. As far as they were concerned, all measures against profligate men were meant to be coercive. If the tactics of shunning and exposure did not work, then they would try legislation.

Moral reformers understood that there was a reason the old tactics of shunning did not work: they were undercut by the legal disabilities under which all women lived. As long as seduction was not a crime, the only legal redress available at the time was to demand an award of additional damages in a civil suit for breach of marriage promise. State courts in the early republic allowed women to bring suit against men who bolted. This was an important recognition both of marriage as a contract between two adults acting in their own right, rather than a species of property transaction from father to son-in-law, and of the right of women to bring suit for breach of promise. But the question now was: would the courts allow women also to sue for damages on the grounds of seduction? Heretofore the traditional view of a woman as legal nonentity had applied; only her male guardian--in most cases, the father--could take this action. In fact, the courts, beginning in the 1830s, bowing to the same mounting public pressure that was fueling the moral reformers' petition drives, began to recognize women's right to sue. A law criminalizing seduction, however, was a major departure from this kind of civil action. It redefined seduction as a crime against society rather than an affront to family honor, it ensured women the right to press charges, and it offered the added satisfaction of putting the perpetrator behind bars rather than placing a monetary value on female chastity.[19]

In the new Victorian era sexual abstinence had its place within marriage as well as in courtship. Dramatic declines in birth rates began in the first decades of the nineteenth century and accelerated in the 1840s and 50s, continuing until 1940 in what historians call "the demographic transition" from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates. Between 1800 and 1940 the decade of sharpest decline occurred in the 1840s.[20]

Although historians cannot fully account for this decline, most credit it to "modern" values that prompted couples to control their future by controlling the numbers of children they had. The results within families were dramatically evident, as the number of children in completed families in 1900 was just half (3.5) the number in 1800 (7.0). Eventually this long-term fertility decline embraced all races and classes. Because two-thirds of the decline was completed before 1880, most of it was accomplished before artificial contraceptive techniques were widely or effectively used. Hence much of this early decline was accomplished by sexual abstinence.[21] The moral reform movement, appealing as it did to married women by valorizing sexual abstinence and condemning the double standard, no doubt played a significant role in this larger process.

Looking back, it is easy to discern fatal flaws in the petition campaign and other aspects of the moral reform program. An attack on the double standard which construed the female only as victim was bound to run up against the actual circumstances of sexual encounters. A moral reform pledge as modeled on the temperance pledge also invited defeat: it is one thing to abstain from alcohol, and quite another to "discountenance licentiousness" and ostracize allegedly "licentious" men. Not surprisingly, few if any cases were ever tried under the anti-abduction and anti-seduction laws. Clauses stipulating that the woman must be "of previous chaste character" and that her testimony alone was insufficient, not to mention the pressure against women seeking redress in a male-dominated justice system, ensured the inefficacy of the legislative approach.[22]

While these failings are apparent, the evidence presented in this project does not support other flaws that some might be tempted to see in this movement. Because the real targets of moral reformers were male sexual predators and male power in general, and their real goal was the reform of gender relations, theirs was not simply an early anti-vice campaign, as some have characterized it. Because of their polemic against "false delicacy," and their insistence on open discussion of sexual matters, moral reformers were not merely exemplars of Victorian prudery. Because of their animus against the degenerate morals of the idle rich, not just the vicious poor, and because of the self-referential focus of so much of their discourse and program, moral reformers in these years were not primarily engaged in "social control" of the urban and working poor.[23]

The significance of the female moral reform movement lay not in the success of its program but in its ability to tap the energies of women in the emerging middle class. It was able to articulate the frustrations and aspirations of these women in the midst of a revolution in sexuality, sexual relations, and family formation very different from what Americans have known in the twentieth century. To the urban and local leadership moral reform gave training in women's political mobilization and, through the petition campaign, in reaching a wider public. In so doing, moral reform provided a precedent for other movements and for women's continued activism in the next generation.


	Document List	First Document