History of Women in the United States: Volume 17/1 Social and Moral Reform [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110971101, 9783598414718

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Edited by Nancy F. Cott Series ISBN 3-598-41454-4 1.

Theory and Method in Women's History ISBN 3-598-41455-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41477-3 Part 2

2.

Household Constitution and Family Relationships ISBN 3-598-41456-0 Domestic Relations and Law ISBN 3-598-41457-9

3.

4.

Domestic Ideology and Domestic Work ISBN 3-598-41458-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41475-7 Part 2

11.

Women's Bodies: Health and Childbirth ISBN 3-598-41465-X

12.

Education ISBN 3-598-41466-8

13.

Religion ISBN 3-598-41467-6

14.

Intercultural and Interracial Relations ISBN 3-598-41468-4

15.

Women and War ISBN 3-598-41469-2

16.

Women Together: Organizational Life ISBN 3-598-41470-6

17.

Social and Moral Reform ISBN 3-598-41471-4 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41695-4 Part 2

5.

The Intersection of Work and Family Life ISBN 3-598-41459-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41476-5 Part 2

6.

Working on the Land ISBN 3-598-41460-9

7.

Industrial Wage Work ISBN 3-598-41461-7 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41693-8 Part 2

18.

Women and Politics ISBN 3-598-41472-2 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41697-0 Part 2

8.

Professional and White-Collar Employments ISBN 3-598-41462-5 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41694-6 Part 2

19.

Woman Suffrage ISBN 3-598-41473-0 Part 1 ISBN 3-598-41696-2 Part 2

20. 9.

Prostitution ISBN 3-598-41463-3

Feminist Struggles for Sex Equality ISBN 3-598-41474-9

10. Sexuality and Sexual Behavior ISBN 3-598-41464-1

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Historical Articles on Women's Lives and Activities

Π

•

Social and Moral Reform

PART Ι

Edited with an Introduction by

Nancy F. Cott Yale University

K G · Saur Munich · New Providence · London · Paris · 1994

Publisher's Note The articles and chapters which comprise this collection originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and are reproduced here in facsimile from the highest quality offprints and photocopies available. The reader will notice some occasional marginal shading and text-curl common to photocopying from tightly bound volumes. Every attempt has been made to either correct or minimize this effect. Copyright information for articles reproduced in this collection appears at the end of this volume. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History of women in the United States : historical articles on women's lives and activities / edited with an introduction by Nancy F. Cott. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: 1. Theory and method in women's history -- 2. Household constitution and family relationships — 3. Domestic relations and law — 4. Domestic ideology and domestic work — 5. The intersection of work and family life — 6. Working on the land - 7. Industrial wage work -- 8. Professional and white-collar employments 9. Prostitution - 10. Sexuality and sexual behavior - 1 1 . Women's bodies -- 12. Education ~ 13. Religion - 14. Intercultural and interracial relations - 15. Women and war — 16. Women together - 17. Social and moral reform — 18. Women and politics — 19. Woman suffrage — 20. Feminist struggles for sex equality. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (set) 1. Women-United States-History. 2. Women-United States-Social conditions. 1. Cott, Nancy F. HQ1410.H57 1992 305.4Ό973—dc20 92-16765 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP - Einheitsaufnahme History of Women in the United States: historical articles on women's lives and activities / ed. with an introd. by Nancy F. Cott. - Munich ; New Providence ; London ; Paris : Saur. ISBN 3-598-41454-4 NE: Cott, Nancy F. (Hrsg.) Vol. 17. social and moral reform - (1994) Pt. 1. -(1994) ISBN 3-598-41471-4

® Printed on acid-free paper/Gedruckt auf säurefreiem Papier All Rights Strictly Reserved/Alle Rechte vorbehalten K.G. Saur Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, Munich 1994 A Reed Reference Publishing Company Printed in the United States of America Printed/Bound by Edwards Brothers Incorporated, Ann Arbor ISBN 3-598-41471-4 (vol. 17/part 1) ISBN 3-598-41454-4 (series)

Contents Series Preface Introduction

xi xiii

Part 1 Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America CARROLL SMITH ROSENBERG

3

The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America MARY P. RYAN

26

The Forten-Purvis Women of Philadelphia and the American Anti-Slavery Crusade JANICE SUMLER-LEWIS

46

Race, Sex, and the Dimensions of Liberty in Antebellum America JEAN MATTHEWS

54

The Origins of Temperance Activism and Militancy among American Women JED DANNENBAUM

71

Women, Children, and the Uses of the Streets: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860 CHRISTINE STANSELL

89

Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860 IAN R . T Y R R E L L

116

The Yankee Schoolmarm in Freedmen's Schools: An Analysis of Attitudes SANDRA E. SMALL

141

ν

CONTENTS

Women Who Were More Than Men: Sex and Status in Freedmen's Teaching JACQUELINE JONES

163

Yankee Schoolmarms and the Domestication of the South SYLVIA D. HOFFERT

176

The Charitable and the Poor: The Emergence of Domestic Politics in Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1880 LEEANN WHITES

190

"The Ladies Want to Bring about Reform in the Public Schools": Public Education and Women's Rights in the Post-Civil War South KATHLEEN C. BERKELEY

206

Temperance, Benevolence, and the City: The Cleveland NonPartisan Woman's Christian Temperance Union, 1874-1900 MARIAN J. MORTON

220

Their Sisters' Keepers: An Historical Perspective on Female Correctional Institutions in the United States: 1870-1900 ESTELLE Β. FREEDMAN

236

The "New Woman" in the New South ANNE FIROR SCOTT

255

Feminism and Temperance Reform in the Boulder WCTU KATHERINE HARRIS

266

Cultural Hybrid in the Slums: The College Woman and the Settlement House, 1889-1894 JOHN P. ROUSMANIERE

280

vi

CONTENTS

Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lillian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman BLANCHE WIESEN COOK

302

Domesticating the Nineteenth-Century American City MARLENE STEIN WORTMAN

335

Women Reformers and American Culture, 1870-1930 JILL CONWAY

377

Part 2 Hull-House as Women's Space HELEN LEFKOWITZ HOROWITZ

391

Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers KATHRYN KISH SKLAR

426

Poverty, Respectability, and Ability to Work SUSAN ESTABROOK KENNEDY

446

The Bonds of Belonging: Leonora O'Reilly and Social Reform MARY J. BULARZIK

464

Feminism or Unionism? The New York Women's Trade Union League and the Labor Movement NANCY SCHROM DYE

488

Mother's Day: The Creation, Promotion and Meaning of a New Holiday in the Progressive Era KATHLEEN W. JONES

503

Early Community Work of Black Club Women GERDA LERNER

525

vii

CONTENTS

School Reform in the New South: The Woman's Association for the Betterment of Public School Houses in North Carolina, 1902-1919 JAMES L. LELOUDIS II

535

Organized Women as Lobbyists in the 1920's DOROTHY E. JOHNSON

559

Social Feminism in the 1920s: Progressive Women and Industrial Legislation J. STANLEY LEMONS

577

After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties ANNE FIROR SCOTT

586

The National Women's Relief Society and the U.S. SheppardTowner Act LORETTA L. HEFNER

607

The Southern Summer School for Women Workers MARY FREDERICKSON

621

The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, 1930-1942 HENRY E. BARBER

635

The Ladies and the Lynchers: A Look at the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching KATHLEEN ATKINSON MILLER

647

Women against Prohibition DAVID E. KYVIG

667

Ladies' Day at the Capitol: Women Strike for Peace Versus HUAC AMY SWERDLOW

685

viii

CONTENTS

The Gender Basis of American Social Policy VIRGINIA SAP1RO

713

Copyright Information

731

Index

737

ix

Series Preface In the space of one generation, women's history has become the fastest-growing area of scholarship in U.S. history. Since the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s and 1970s, insistent questions about the historical meanings of "woman's place" have sowed and reaped a garden of scholarship. Where scholarly works used to be bare of mention of women, academic enterprise has now produced a vigorous growth of books and articles, bringing to light diverse women of every region, race, class and age. This research is marked by a renovating intent that refuses to accept as "human" history a history of men. Interest is lively and debate is stimulating and sought after attendance at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women rivals the size of the annual convention of the American Historical Association. While books in women's history are daily increasing in numbers and strength, as in any fast-developing field the scholarly literature in the form of articles is most expansive and up-to-the-minute. All the history journals now publish articles on women's work, domestic settings, family relations, household matters, female politics and organizations and so forth, and new journals have sprung into being to concentrate on such topics. Women's historians publish in numerous regional and thematic history journals as well as in feminist outlets and in journals of other social science disciplines. This series brings together a collection of outstanding articles from thefield,almost all written in the past twenty years and more than half published during the 1980s. It brings together, in volumes organized by topic, essays otherwise widely dispersed. These volumes reprint only articles that originally appeared in journals, not chapters of books; review articles are not included. Articles have been chosen for overall quality and for range. Each one was chosen for one or more of the following reasons: because it is the standard authority on its subject matter; represents an important statement on a topic by a recognized scholar, presages an important book to come; provides a first look at new evidence or new methods; or opens an untapped area or new controversy. Older articles have been reprinted if their data or interpretation have not been surpassed or if they marked an important stage in the historiography, even if since superseded. The historical coverage of the series extends from the Revolutionary era to the 1960s. The articles themselves are dated from the 1940s through 1988. Volumes are organized by topic rather than time period. Within each volume, the

xi

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SERIES PREFACE

articles are ordered chronologically (with respect to substance), so that the whole can be read as an historical overview. The only exception to this ordering principle is Volume One, on Theory and Method, in which the contents are arranged in order of publication. Within each volume there is an attempt to include articles on as diverse kinds of women as possible. None of the volume topics is regionally or racially defined; rather, all volumes are topically designed so as to afford views of women's work, family lives, and public activities which cut across races and regions. Any volume in the series stands on its own, supplying as full a treatment of a designated subject matter as the scholarly literature will provide. Several groupings of volumes also make sense; that is, volumes two through five all center around domestic and family matters; volumes five through nine consider other varieties of women's work; volumes nine through eleven concern uses and abuses of women's bodies; volumes twelve through fourteen look at major aspects of socialization; and volumes fifteen through twenty include organizational and political efforts of many sorts. As a whole, the series displays in all its range the vitality of the field of women's history. Aside from imbuing U.S. history with new vision, scholarship in this area has informed, and should continue to inform, current public debate on issues from parental leave to the nuclear freeze. By bringing historical articles together under topical headings, these volumes both represent accurately the shape of historical controversy (or consensus) on given issues and make historians' findings most conveniently available for current reference.

Introduction It is no exaggeration to say that women have been the welders and mainstays of community improvement in the U.S., linking their task of family nurturance with the welfare of their local communities. Articles in this volume show the vast range and number of women's efforts to bring charity to the poor, to oppose prostitution, to end alcoholic excess, to improve public education, to "Americanize" immigrants, to regulate the conditions of women and children in industry, to improve public health and sanitation, to prevent racially-motivated lynching, and much more. Taken together they indicate women's continuing public activity and the central contributions of women's voluntary efforts to the development of modern state-based social policy. As discussed in prior volumes, women's organized benevolence originated in response to both state and church, or to both national and religious, stimuli: that is, in response to Revolutionary war demands for women's extraordinary services, and to the evangelical impulse of the religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening. Throughout U.S. history, the Protestant women involved in social and moral reform have, interestingly, mixed these national and religious motives, so that explicitly evangelical efforts have been directed to the nation's safety and order, and, on the other hand, advocates of explicitly secular aims have couched them in Biblical language and seen them as infused with God's grace. Therefore, while it has been important for historians to note distinctions between the church-based reform organizations which have numerically dominated U.S. women' s history, and the strictly secular ones, the ideological similarities between these two categories of organizations (especially in the nineteenth century) are perhaps as striking as their differences. This seems to be as true of the community activities of black women as of white. The social and moral reforms pursued by women' s associations have been seen in several aspects: perhaps foremost, as modes of self-assertive public action and self-realization by women. Often, in looking at women's efforts on behalf of the poor or needy—others than themselves—historians have asked how the female reformers' advancement of their own rights and status has been involved. Nineteenth-century participants put all sorts of women's activities outside the home, from charity and benevolence to directly self-interested pursuit of education or professional advancement, under the one rubric, "the woman movement," and historians have had to consider what kind of relation these activities bear to each other. The question whether the trajectory of religious-based social reform, in particular, led participants toward women's rights activity, or substituted for or led xiii

xiv

INTRODUCTION

away from it, has been of interest. For instance, research has made clear, that the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, begun in 1874, bulked larger than any other women's organization for a quarter-century, its members far outnumbering those in woman suffrage associations. Its scores of local chapters pursued welfare and reform efforts ranging much beyond the ending of alcohol consumption. Its bold and charismatic leader Frances Willaid made the leap and the link from women's associational activities to national politics. Willard's own aim to increase women's stature and power in the public arena and the home seems indisputable, but historians have been much more divided about whether thousands of women's participation in local WCTU chapters reinforced pre-existing conceptions of the limitation on the female "sphere" or challenged them. Two other aspects of women's work in social and moral reform have drawn historians' attentions and have generated historiographical controversies. These reform efforts have often been a stage for interactions between women of different classes and backgrounds: between the elite and the poor, between middle-class matrons and working-class wage-earners, between Protestant evangelicals and those whom they would convert, between white Northern teachers and freed black slaves, between native-born Americans and immigrants. Historians have probed motives and behaviorand results, questioning how radical, or how serious, or how altruistic were women reformers—how far they were able to understand or identify with the situation of the women whom they claimed to benefit, or how far, perhaps, they were protecting their own class position or group self-interest, rationalizing the social order without changing the relative distribution of power. Such questions often come up in connection with the great outburst of ameliorative reform endeavors—sometimes denominated "municipal housekeeping"—conducted by middle-class women's clubs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This era brings to the fore a third important aspect of social and moral reform work of women's groups, as precursors and goads to state welfare policy. During this era women's groups exposed corrupt or inefficient municipal services, founded municipal institutions for the arts and humanities (such as libraries, symphonies, and historical associations), pressed for pure food and drug regulations, established playgrounds and drinking fountains, started kindergartens, investigated and lobbied for reform of working conditions in factories and sweatshops and department stores for women workers, and found a hundred other improvements to be made in ordinary standards of urban living. Most of the issues of health, safety and social welfare about which women formed and forwarded voluntary efforts have since been absorbed by government agencies, as legitimate and necessary affairs of state. Integration of these new findings by women's historians into the standard political history of the United States in the progressive era has yet to take place. It has yet to be fully assessed just how significant women's voluntary activities were, as compared to the political theories of male

INTRODUCTION

xv

academics and intellectuals, and the consolidation of power in economic life, and the model of European social democracies, and the leadership of male politicians and reformers at the municipal, state and national levels, in creating the interventionist state of the twentieth century. It is clear, however, that some women—for instance, settlement house resident, factory inspector, social investigator, social theorist and inveterate reformer Florence Kelley—were leaders in this development, and that the endeavors of masses of women to make basic human welfare a concern of representative government cannot be left out of any accurate picture of the process of state development over the past hundred years. Articles in the present volume illuminate all these aspects of women's social and moral reform efforts. The contents of this volume overlap with many concerns of those in volume XVI and volume XVIII. This one concentrates on the reform aims of allwomen networks and associations, as distinct from internal dynamics of organizations (the focus in XVI, Women Together: Organizational

Life), or women's

reform efforts pursued in concert with men (the focus in XVIII, Women and Politics).

Social and Moral Reform

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

CARROLL

SMITH ROSENBERG University of Pennsylvania

Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America O N A S P R I N G E V E N I N G IN MAY 1 8 3 4 , A S M A L L G R O U P O F W O M E N M E T AT T H E

revivalistic Third Presbyterian C h u r c h in New York City to found the New York F e m a l e M o r a l R e f o r m Society. T h e Society's goals were ambitious indeed; it hoped to convert New Y o r k ' s prostitutes to evangelical Protestantism and close forever the city's numerous brothels. This bold a t t a c k on prostitution was only one part of the Society's p r o g r a m . T h e s e self-assertive women hoped as well to confront that larger and m o r e f u n d a m e n t a l abuse, the double s t a n d a r d , and the male sexual license it condoned. Too many men, the Society defiantly asserted in its s t a t e m e n t of goals, were aggressive d e s t r o y e r s of female innocence and happiness. N o man was above suspicion. W o m e n ' s only safety lay in a militant effort to r e f o r m A m e r i c a n sexual m o r e s — a n d , as we shall see, to r e f o r m sexual mores m e a n t in p r a c t i c e to control m a n ' s sexual values and autonomy. T h e rhetoric of the Society's spokesmen consistently betrayed an unmistakable and deeply felt r e s e n t m e n t toward a male-dominated society. 1 ""Minutes of the Meeting of the Ladies' Society for the Observance of the Seventh Commandment held in Chatham Street Chapel, May 12, 1834," and "Constitution of the New York Female Moral Reform Society," both in ledger book entitled "Constitution and Minutes of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, May, 1834 to July 1839," deposited in the archives of the American Female Guardian Society (hereinafter referred to as A.F.G.S.), Woodycrest Avenue, Bronx, New York. (The Society possesses the executive committee minutes from May 1835-June 1847, and from Jan. 7, 1852-Feb. 18, 1852.) For a more detailed institutional history of the Society see Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and

3

4

HISTORY O F W O M E N IN THE UNITED STATES

Few if any m e m b e r s of t h e Society were r e f o r m e d prostitutes or the victims of r a p e or seduction. M o s t c a m e f r o m middle-class native American backgrounds and lived quietly respectable lives as pious wives and mothers. W h a t needs explaining is the emotional logic which underlay the Society's militant and controversial p r o g r a m of sexual r e f o r m . I would like to suggest that both its r e f o r m p r o g r a m and the anti-male s e n t i m e n t s it served to express reflect a neglected a r e a of stress in mid-19th century America—that is, the n a t u r e of t h e role to be a s s u m e d by the middleclass American woman. America society from the 1830s to the 1860s was marked by advances in political democracy, by a rapid increase in economic, social and geographic mobility, and by uncompromising and morally relentless r e f o r m movements. Though many aspects of Jacksonianism have been subjected to historical investigation, the possibly stressful effects of such s t r u c t u r a l change upon family and sex roles have not. T h e following pages c o n s t i t u t e an a t t e m p t to glean some understanding of women and w o m e n ' s role in antebellum A m e r i c a through an analysis of a self-consciously f e m a l e voluntary association dedicated to t h e eradication of sexual immorality. Women in Jacksonian A m e r i c a had few rights and little power. Their role in society was passive and sharply limited. W o m e n were, in general, denied formal education above the minimum required by a l i t e r a t e early industrial society. T h e female brain and nervous system, male physicians and educators agreed, were i n a d e q u a t e to sustained intellectual effort. They were denied the vote in a society which placed a high value upon political participation; political activity might corrupt their pure feminine nature. All professional roles (with the exception of primary school education) were closed to women. Even so traditional a f e m a l e role as midwife was undermined as male physicians began to establish professional control over obstetrics. M o s t economic alternatives to m a r r i a g e (except such b u r d e n s o m e and menial t a s k s as those of s e a m s t r e s s or d o m e s t i c ) were closed to women. Their property rights were still r e s t r i c t e d and females were generally considered to be t h e legal w a r d s either of t h e s t a t e or of their n e a r e s t male relative. In the event of divorce, the m o t h e r lost custody of her children—even when the husband was conceded to be t h e erring party. 2 W o m e n ' s universe was bounded by their homes and t h e

the Rise of the American City (Ithaca. N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1971), chaps. 4 and 7. The New York Female Moral R e f o r m Society changed its n a m e to American F e m a l e Guardian Society in 1849. T h e Society continues today, helping children from broken homes. Its present n a m e is Woodycrest Youth Service. 'For a well-balanced though brief discussion of American women's role in a n t e b e l l u m America see Eleanor Flexner, A Century of Struggle (Cambridge: H a r v a r d Univ. Press, 1959), chaps. I 4.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

career of father or husband; within the home it was woman's duty to be submissive and patient. Yet this was a period when change was considered a self-evident good, and when nothing was believed impossible to a determined free will, be it the conquest of a continent, the reform of society or the eternal salvation of all mankind. The contrast between these generally accepted ideals and expectations and the real possibilities available to American women could not have been more sharply drawn. It is not implausible to assume that at least a minority of American women would find ways to manifest a discontent with their comparatively passive and constricted social role. Only a few women in antebellum America were able, however, to openly criticize their socially defined sexual identity. A handful, like Fanny Wright, devoted themselves to overtly subversive criticism of the social order. 3 A scarcely more numerous group became pioneers in women's education. Others such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony founded the women's rights movement. But most respectable women—even those with a sense of ill-defined grievance—were unable to explicitly defy traditional sex-role prescriptions. I would like to suggest that many such women channeled frustration, anger and a compensatory sense of superior righteousness into the reform movements of the first half of the 19th century; and in the controversial moral reform crusade such motivations seem particularly apparent. While unassailable within the absolute categories of a pervasive evangelical world-view, the Female Moral Reform Society's crusade against illicit sexuality permitted an expression of anti-male sentiments. And the Society's "final solution"—the right to control the mores of men—provided a logical emotional redress for those feelings of passivity which we have suggested. It should not be surprising that between 1830 and 1860 a significant number of militant women joined a crusade to establish their right to define—and limit—man's sexual behavior. Yet adultery and prostitution were unaccustomed objects of reform even in the enthusiastic and millennial America of the 1830s. The mere discussion of these taboo subjects shocked most Americans; to undertake such a crusade implied no ordinary degree of commitment. T h e founders of the Female Moral Reform Society, however, were able to find both

' T h e r e a r e two modern biographies of Fanny Wright, both r a t h e r thin: W. R. W a t e r m a n . Frances Wright (New York: Columbia Univ. Press.. 1924); Alice J. Perkins, Frances Wright. Free Enquirer (New York: H a r p e r & Bros., 1939). Fanny Wright was one of the first women in America to speak about women's rights before large audiences of both men and women. Yet she attracted very few women into the woman's rights movement, probably because her economic and political views and her emphatic rejection of Christianity s e e m e d too radical to most American women.

5

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HISTORY O F W O M E N IN THE UNITED STATES

legitimization for the expression of grievance normally unspoken and an impulse to activism in the moral categories of evangelical piety. Both pious activism and sex-role anxieties shaped the early years of the Female Moral Reform Society. This conjunction of motives was hardly accidental. The lady founders of the Moral R e f o r m Society and their new organization represented an e x t r e m e wing of that movement within American Protestantism known as the Second Great Awakening. These women were intensely pious Christians, convinced that an era of millennial perfection awaited human effort. In this fervent generation, such deeply felt millennial possibilities m a d e social action a moral imperative. Like many of the abolitionists, jacksonian crusaders against sexual transgression were dedicated activists, compelled to attack sin wherever it existed and in whatever form it assumed—even the unmentionable sin of illicit sexuality. New Yorkers' first awareness of the moral reform crusade c a m e in the spring of 1832 when the New York Magdalen Society (an organization which sought to reform prostitutes) issued its first annual report. Written by John McDowall, their missionary and agent, the report stated unhesitatingly that 10,000 prostitutes lived and worked in New York City. Not only sailors and other transients, but men from the city's most respected families, were regular brothel patrons. Lewdness and impurity tainted all sectors of New York society. T r u e Christians, the report concluded, must wage a thoroughgoing crusade against violators of the Seventh Commandment. 4 The report shocked and irritated respectable New Y o r k e r s — n o t only by its tone of righteous indignation and implied criticism of the city's old and established families. T h e report, it seemed clear to many New Yorkers, was obscene, its author a m e r e seeker after n o t o r i e t y / Hostility quickly spread from McDowall to the Society itself; its m e m b e r s were verbally abused and threatened with ostracism. T h e society disbanded. A few of the women, however, would not retreat. Working quietly, they 'John R. McDowall, Magdalen Report, r p r . McDowalt's Journal. 2 ( M a y 1834), 33-38. For the history of t h e New Y o r k M a g d a l e n Society see First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Sew York Magdalen Society, Instituted January I, 1830. See as well, Rosenberg. Religion, chap. 4. 'Flora L. N o r t h r u p , The Record of a Century (New York: A m e r i c a n F e m a l e G u a r d ian Soc., 1934), pp. 13-14; cf. McDowalls Defence, 1, No. I (July 1836), 3; The Trial of the Reverend John Robert McDowall by the Third Presbytery of New York in February. March, and April, 1836 (New Y o r k , 1836). [ T h o m a s Hastings Sr.], Missionary Labors through a Series of Years among Fallen Women by the Mew-York Magdalen Society ( N e w Y o r k : N.Y. Magdalen Soc., 1870), p. 15.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

began to found church-affiliated female moral reform societies. Within a year, they had created a number of such groups, connected for the most part with the city's more evangelical congregations. These pious women hoped to reform prostitutes, but more immediately to warn other Godfearing Christians of the pervasiveness of sexual sin and the need to oppose it. Prostitution was a f t e r all only one of many offenses against the Seventh C o m m a n d m e n t ; adultery, lewd thoughts and language, and bawdy literature were equally sinful in the eyes of God. These women at the same time continued unofficially to support their f o r m e r missionary, John McDowall, using his newly established moral reform newspaper to advance their cause not only in the city, but throughout New York State. 6 After more than a year of such discreet crusading, the women active in the moral reform cause felt sufficiently numerous and confident to organize a second city-wide moral reform society, and renew their efforts to reform the city's prostitutes. On the evening of May 12, 1834, they met at the Third Presbyterian Church to found the New York Female Moral Reform Society. 7 Nearly four years of opposition and controversy had hardened the women's ardor into a militant determination. They proposed through their organization to extirpate sexual license and the double standard from American society. A forthright list of resolves announced their organization: R e s o l v e d , T h a t i m m e d i a t e and vigorous e f f o r t s s h o u l d be m a d e to c r e a t e a public s e n t i m e n t in r e s p e c t to this sin; and a l s o in r e s p e c t to the duty of parents, church m e m b e r s and ministers on t h e s u b j e c t , which shall be in stricter accord a n c e with . . . t h e word o f God. R e s o l v e d , T h a t the licentious m a n is no less guilty than his v i c t i m , and ought, t h e r e f o r e , to be e x c l u d e d from all virtuous f e m a l e s o c i e t y . R e s o l v e d , T h a t it is t h e imperious duty o f ladies e v e r y w h e r e , and o f every religious d e n o m i n a t i o n , to c o - o p e r a t e in t h e g r e a t work o f moral r e f o r m .

A sense of urgency and spiritual absolutism m a r k e d this organizational meeting, and indeed all of the Society's official statements for years to come. " I t is the duty of the virtuous to use every consistent moral means to save our country from utter destruction," the women warned. " T h e sin of Northrup, Record of a Century, pp. 14 15; only two volumes of McDowall's Journal were published, covering the period Jan. 1833 to Dec. 1834. Between the demise of the New York Magdalen Society and the organization of the New York Female Moral Reform Society (hereinafter. N . Y . F . M . R . S . ) . McDowall was connected, as agent, with a third society, the New York Female Benevolent Society, which he had helped found in February of 1833. For a more detailed account see Carroll S. Rosenberg, "Evangelicalism and the New City," Ph.D. Diss. Columbia University. 1968, chap. 5. ; ΜcDovall's Journal. 2 (Jan. 1834). 6-7.

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licentiousness has made fearful havoc . . . drowning souls in perdition and exposing us to the vengeance of a holy God." Americans hopeful of witnessing the promised millennium could delay no longer. 8 The motivating zeal which allowed the rejection of age-old proprieties and defied the criticism of pulpit and press was no casual and fashionable enthusiasm. Only an extraordinary set of legitimating values could have justified such commitment. And this was indeed the case. The women moral reformers acted in the conscious conviction that God imperiously commanded their work. As they explained soon after organizing their society: "As Christians we must view it in the light of God's word—we must enter into His feelings on the subject—engage in its overthrow just in the manner he would have us. . . .We must look away from all worldly opinions or influences, for they are perverted and wrong; and individually act only as in the presence of God." 9 Though the Society's pious activism had deep roots in the evangelicalism of the Second Great Awakening, the immediate impetus for the founding of the Moral Reform Society came from the revivals Charles G. Finney conducted in New York City between the summer of 1829 and the spring of 1834.10 Charles Finney, reformer, revivalist and perfectionist theologian from western New York State, remains a pivotal figure in the history of American Protestantism. The four years Finney spent in New York had a profound influence on the city's churches and reform movements, and upon the consciences generally of the thousands of New Yorkers who crowded his revival meetings and flocked to his churches. Finney insisted that his disciples end any compromise with sin or human injustice. Souls were lost and sin prevailed, Finney urged, because men chose to sin—because they chose not to work in God's vineyard converting souls and reforming sinners." Inspired by Finney's sermons, thousands of New Yorkers turned to ""Minutes of t h e M e e t i n g of t h e Ladies' Society for t h e O b s e r v a n c e of the Seventh C o m mandment . . . May 12, 1834." and " P r e a m b l e , " "Constitution of the N e w York F e m a l e Moral R e f o r m S o c i e t y . " 'Advocate of Moral Reform ( h e r e i n a f t e r . Advocate) I ( J a n . - F e b . 1835), 6. T h e Advocate was the Society's official journal. '"Close ties connected the N . Y . F . M . R . S . with the Finney wing of A m e r i c a n P r o t e s t a n t i s m . Finney's wife was the Society's first president. T h e Society's second president, M r s . William Green, was the wife of one of Finney's closest s u p p o r t e r s . T h e Society's clerical support in New York City c a m e f r o m Finney's disciples. Their chief financial advisers and initial sponsors were A r t h u r and Lewis T a p p a n , New York m e r c h a n t s who were also C h a r l e s Finney's chief financial s u p p o r t e r s . For a list of early " m a l e a d v i s e r s " to the N . Y . F . M . R . S . see Joshua Leavitt, Memoir and Select Remains of the Late Reverend John R. McDowell (New York: Joshua Leavitt. Lord. 1838), pp. 248, also pp. 99. 151. 192. See as well L. Nelson Nichols and Allen Knight C h a l m e r s , History of the Broadway Tabernacle of New York City (New Haven: T u t t l e . M o r e h o u s e & T a y l o r . 1940). pp. 4 9 - 6 7 , and William G . M c L o u g h lin Jr., Modern Revivalism (New York: Ronald Press. 1959), pp. 50-53. " F o r an excellent m o d e r n analysis of Finney's theology and his place in A m e r i c a n Prot-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

missionary work; they distributed Bibles and t r a c t s to the irreligious, established Sunday schools and sent ministers to the frontier. 1 2 A smaller, more zealous number espoused abolition as well, determined, like Garrison, never to be silent and to be heard. An even smaller number of the most zealous and determined t u r n e d — a s we have seen—to moral reform. 1 3 The program adopted by the Female Moral R e f o r m Society in the spring of 1834 embraced two quite different, though to the Society's founders quite consistent, modes of attack. One was absolutist and millennial, an a t t e m p t to convert all of America to perfect moral purity. Concretely the New York women hoped to create a militant nationwide women's organization to fight the double standard and indeed any form of licentiousness—beginning of course in their own homes and neighborhoods. Only an organization of women, they contended, could be trusted with so sensitive and yet monumental a task. At the same time, the Society sponsored a paralled and somewhat more pragmatic a t t e m p t to convert and reform New York City's prostitutes. Though strikingly dissimilar in method and geographic scope, both efforts were unified by an uncompromising millennial zeal and by a strident hostility to the licentious and predatory male. T h e Society began its renewed drive against prostitution in the fall of 1834 when the executive committee appointed John McDowall their missionary to New Y o r k ' s prostitutes and hired two young men to assist him.' 4 T h e Society's three missionaries visited the female wards of the almshouse, the city hospital and jails, leading prayer meetings, distributing Bibles and tracts. A greater proportion of their time, however, was spent in a more controversial m a n n e r , systematically visiting—or, to be more accurate, descending upon—brothels, praying with and exhorting both the inmates and their patrons. T h e missionaries were especially fond of arriving early Sunday morning—catching women and customers as they

eslantism see McLoughlin. Modern Revivalism. McLoughlin has as well edited Finney's series of New York Revivals which were first published in 1835. Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals uj Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press. 1960). McLoughlin's introduction is excellent. "Rosenberg. Religion, chaps. 2 and 3. ' T h e s e reforms were by no means mutually exclusive. Indeed there was a logical and emotional interrelation between evangelical Protestantism and its missionary aspects and such formally secular reforms as peace, abolition and temperance. The interrelation is demonstrated in the lives of such reformers as the Tappan brothers, the Grimki sisters, Theodore Dwight Weld. Charles Finney and in the overlapping membership of the many religious and "secular" reform societies of the Jacksonian period. On the other hand, the overlap was not absolute, some reformers rejecting evangelical Protestantism, others pietism, or another of the period's reforms. "Advocate. I (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 4; Northrup, Record, p. 19.

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awoke on the traditionally sacred day. The missionaries would announce their arrival by a vigorous reading of Bible passages, followed by prayer and hymns. At other times they would station themselves across the street from known brothels to observe and note the identity of customers. They soon found their simple presence had an important deterring effect, many men, with doggedly innocent expressions, pausing momentarily and then hastily walking past. Closed coaches, they also reported, were observed to circle suspiciously for upwards of an hour until, the missionary remaining, they drove away. 1S The Female Moral Reform Society did not depend completely on paid missionaries for the success of such pious h a r a s s m e n t . T h e Society's executive committee, accompanied by like-thinking male volunteers, regularly visited the city's hapless brothels. (The executive c o m m i t t e e minutes for January 1835, for example, contain a lengthy discussion of the properly discreet makeup of groups for such "active visiting.") 16 T h e m e m b e r s went primarily to pray and to exert moral influence. They were not unaware, however, of the financially disruptive effect that frequent visits of large groups of praying Christians would have. 17 The executive committee also aided the concerned parents (usually rural) of runaway daughters who, they feared, might have drifted to the city and been forced into prostitution. Members visited brothels asking for information about such girls; one pious volunteer even pretended to be delivering laundry in order to gain admittance to a brothel suspected of hiding such a runaway.'" In conjunction with their visiting, the Moral R e f o r m Society opened a House of Reception, a would-be refuge for prostitutes seeking to reform. The Society's managers and missionaries felt that if the prostitute could be convinced of her sin, and then offered both a place of r e t r e a t and an economic alternative to prostitution, reform would surely follow. Thus they envisioned their home as a "house of industry" where the errant ones would be taught new trades and prepared for useful jobs—while being instructed in morality and religion. When the m a n a g e r s felt their repentant charges prepared to return to society, they attempted to find them jobs with Christian families—and, so far as possible, away from the city's temptations.19 Despite their efforts, however, few prostitutes reformed; fewer still appeared, to their benefactresses, to have experienced the saving grace of ' Advocate, 1 ( M a r . 1835). 11-12; 1 (Nov. 1835). 86; N . Y . F . M . R . S . , " E x e c u t i v e C o m m i t tee Minutes, June 6. 1835 and April 30, 1836." These pious visitors received their most polite receptions at the more expensive houses, while the girls and c u s t o m e r s of lower-class, slum brothels met them almost uniformly with curses and t h r e a t s . "'N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes, Jan. 24, 1835." '•Advocate, I (Jan.-Feb. 1835). 7. "For a description of one such incident see Advocate, 4 ( J a n . 15, 1838), 15. Advocate, I (Sept. I. 1835), 72; Northrup, Record, p. 19.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

conversion. Indeed, the number of inmates at the Society's House of Reception was always small. In March 1835, for instance, the executive committee reported only fourteen women at the House. A year later, total admissions had reached but thirty—only four of whom were considered saved. 20 The final debacle came that summer when the regular manager of the House left the city because of poor health. In his absence, the executive committee reported unhappily, the inmates seized control, and discipline and morality deteriorated precipitously. The managers reassembled in the fall to find their home in chaos. Bitterly discouraged, they dismissed the few remaining unruly inmates and closed the building.21 The moral rehabilitation of New York's streetwalkers was but one aspect of the Society's attack upon immorality. The founders of the Female Moral Reform Society saw as their principal objective the creation of a woman's crusade to combat sexual license generally and the double standard particularly. American women would no longer willingly tolerate that traditional—and role-defining—masculine ethos which allotted respect to the hearty drinker and the sexual athlete. This age-old code of masculinity was as obviously related to man's social preeminence as it was contrary to society's explicitly avowed norms of purity and domesticity. The subterranean mores of the American male must be confronted, exposed and rooted out. The principal weapon of the Society in this crusade was its weekly, The Advocate of Moral Reform. In the fall of 1834, when the Society hired John McDowall as its agent, it voted as well to purchase his journal and transform it into a national women's paper with an exclusively female staff. Within three years, the Advocate grew into one of the nation's most widely read evangelical papers, boasting 16,500 subscribers. By the late 1830s the Society's managers pointed to this publication as their most important activity. 22 Two themes dominated virtually every issue of the Advocate from its founding in January 1835, until the early 1850s. The first was an angry and emphatic insistence upon the lascivious and predatory nature of the American male. Men were the initiators in virtually every case of adultery or fornication—and the source, therefore, of that widespread immorality which endangered America's spiritual life and delayed the promised w Advocate, 1 (Mar. 1835), II; N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes, Apr. 5, 1836, May 30, 1835." "N.Y.F.M.R.S., "ExecutiveCommittee Minutes, Oct. 4, 1836." "N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes, June 6 and June 25, 1835, June (n.d.), 1836"; N.Y.F.M.R.S., The Guardian or Fourth Annual Report of the New York Female Moral Reform Society presented May 9,1838. pp. 4-6.

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millennium. A second major theme in the Advocate's editorials and letters was a call for the creation of a national union of women. Through their collective action such a united group of women might ultimately control the behavior of adult males and of the members' own children, particularly their sons. The founders and supporters of the Female Moral Reform Society entertained several primary assumptions concerning the nature of human sexuality. Perhaps most central was the conviction that women felt little sexual desire; they were in almost every instance induced to violate the Seventh Commandment by lascivious men who craftily manipulated not their sensuality, but rather the female's trusting and affectionate nature. A woman acted out of romantic love, not carnal desire; she was innocent and defenseless, gentle and passive. 23 "The worst crime alleged against [the fallen woman] in the outset," the Advocate's editors explained, "is . . . 'She is without discretion.' She is open-hearted, sincere, and affectionate She trusts the vows of the faithless. She commits her all into the hands of the deceiver." 24 The male lecher, on the other hand, was a creature controlled by base sexual drives which he neither could nor would control. He was, the Advocate's editors bitterly complained, powerful and decisive; unwilling (possibly unable) to curb his own willfulness, he callously used it to coerce the more passive and submissive female. This was an age of rhetorical expansiveness, and the Advocate's editors and correspondents felt little constraint in their delineation of the dominant and aggressive male. "Reckless," "bold," " m a d , " "drenched in sin" were terms used commonly to describe erring males; they "robbed," "ruined" and "rioted." But one term above all others seemed most fit to describe the lecher—"The Destroyer." 25 A deep sense of anger and frustration characterized the Advocate's discussion of such all-conquering males, a theme reiterated again and again in the letters sent to the paper by rural sympathizers. Women saw themselves with few defenses against the determined male; his will was far stronger than that of woman. 2 * Such letters often expressed a bitterness ""Budding," "lovely," " f r e s h , " "joyous," "unsuspecting lamb," were frequent terms used to describe innocent women before their seduction. The Advocate contained innumerable letters and editorials on this theme. See, for example. Advocate, 4 (Jan. I, 1838), 1; Advocate, 10 (Mar. 1, 1844), 34; Advocate and Guardian (the Society changed the name of its journal in 1847), 16 (Jan. 1, 1850), 3. "Letter in Advocate, I (Apr. 1835), 19. " " M u r d e r e r of Virtue" was another favorite and pithy phrase. For a sample of such references see: Advocate, 4 (Feb. I, 1838), 17, Advocate, 10 (Jan. 1, 1844), 19-20; Advocate. 10(Jan. 15, 1844), 29; Advocate, 10 (Mar. 1, 1844), 33. *Advocate, I (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 3; Advocate, 1 (Apr. 1835), 19; Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 1, 1850), 3.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

which seems directed not only against the specific seducer, but toward all American men. One representative rural subscriber complained, for example: "Honorable men; they would not plunder; . . . an imputation on their honour might cost a man his life's blood. And yet they are so passingly mean, so utterly contemptible, as basely and treacherously to contrive . . . the destruction of happiness, peace, morality, and all that is endearing in social life; they plunge into degradation, misery, and ruin, those whom they profess to love. Ο let them not be trusted. Their 'tender mercies are cruel.'"" The double standard seemed thus particularly unjust; it came to symbolize and embody for the Society and its rural sympathizers the callous indifference—indeed at times almost sadistic pleasure—a male-dominated society took in the misfortune of a passive and defenseless woman. The respectable harshly denied her their friendship; even parents might reject her. Often only the brothel offered food and shelter. But what of her seducer? Conventional wisdom found it easy to condone his greater sin: men will be men and right-thinking women must not inquire into such questionable matters. 2 8 But it was just such matters, the Society contended, to which women must address themselves. They must enforce God's commandments despite hostility and censure. "Public opinion must be operated upon," the executive committee decided in the winter of 1835, "by endeavoring to bring the virtuous to treat the guilty of both sexes alike, and exercise toward them the same feeling." "Why should a female be trodden under foot," the executive committee's minutes questioned plaintively, "and spurned from society and driven from a parent's roof, if she but fall into sin—while common consent allows the male to habituate himself to this vice, and treats him as not guilty. Has God made a distinction in regard to the two sexes in this respect? 29 The guilty woman too should be condemned, the Moral Reform Society's quarterly meeting resolved in 1838: "But let not the most guilty of the two—the deliberate destroyer of female innocence— be afforded even an 'apron of fig leaves' to conceal the blackness of his crimes." 3 0 Women must unite in a holy crusade against such sinners. The Society called upon pious women throughout the country to shun all social contact with men suspected of improper behavior—even if that behavior con' ; L e t t e r in McDowaU s Journal, 2 (Apr. 1834), 26-27. " M a n y subscribers wrote to the Advocate complaining of the injustice of the double s t a n d a r d . See, for example: Advocate, 1 ( A p r . 1835), 22; Advocate, 1 ( D e c . 1835), 91; Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 1, 1850). 5. "Advocate, I ( J a n . - F e b . 1835), 6 7. '"Resolution passed at the Quarterly M e e t i n g of the N . Y . F . M . R . S . , J a n . 1838, printed in Advocate. 4 (Jan. 15. 1838), 14.

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sisted only of reading improper books or singing indelicate songs. Churchgoing women of every village and town must organize local campaigns to outlaw such men from society and hold them up to public judgment. 31 "Admit him not to your house," the executive committee urged, "hold no converse with him, warn others of him, permit not your friends to have fellowship with him, mark him as an evildoer, stamp him as a villain and exclaim, 'Behold the Seducer.'" The power of ostracism could become an effective weapon in the defense of morality. 32 A key tactic in this campaign of public exposure was the Society's willingness to publish the names of men suspected of sexual immorality. The Advocate's editors announced in their first issue that they intended to pursue this policy, first begun by John McDowall in his Journal.33 " W e think it proper," they stated defiantly, "even to expose names, for the same reason that the names of thieves and robbers are published, that the public may know them and govern themselves accordingly. We mean to let the licentious know, that if they are not ashamed of their debasing vice, we will not be ashamed to expose t h e m . . . . It is a justice which we owe each other." 34 Their readers responded enthusiastically to this invitation. Letters from rural subscribers poured into the Advocate, recounting specific instances of seduction in their towns and warning readers to avoid the men described. The editors dutifully set them in type and printed them. 35 Within New York City itself the executive committee of the Society actively investigated charges of seduction and immorality. A particular target of their watchfulness was the city's employment agencies—or information offices as they were then called; these were frequently fronts for the white-slave trade. The Advocate printed the names and addresses of suspicious agencies, warning women seeking employment to avoid them at all costs. 36 Prostitutes whom the Society's missionaries visited in brothels, in prison or in the city hospital were urged to report the names of men who had first seduced them and also of their later customers; they could then be published in the AdvocateThe executive committee undertook as well "This was one of the more important functions of the auxiliaries, and their m e m b e r s uniformly pledged themselves to ostracize all offending males. For an example of such pledges see Advocate, 4 (Jan. 15, 1838), 16. "Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 1, 1850), 3. " M c D o w a l l urged his rural subscribers to report any instances of seduction. He dutifully printed all the details, referring to the accused man by initials, but otherwise giving the names of towns, counties and dates. M a l e response was on occasion bitter. "Advocate, I (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 2. " T h r o u g h o u t t h e 1830s virtually every issue of t h e Advocate contained such letters. The Advocate continued to publish them throughout t h e 1840s. " F o r detailed discussions of particular employment agencies and the decision to print their names see: N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes, Feb. 12, 1845, July 8, 1846." " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes, M a r . 1, 1838, M a r . 15, 1838"; Advocate,4 (Jan. 15, 1838), 15.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

a lobbying campaign in Albany to secure the passage of a statute making seduction a crime for the male participant. 3 * While awaiting the passage of this measure, the executive committee encouraged and aided victims of seduction (or where appropriate their parents or employers) to sue their seducers on the grounds of loss of services. 39 Ostracism, exposure and statutory enactment offered immediate, if unfortunately partial, solutions to the problem of male licentiousness. But for the seduced and ruined victim such vengeance came too late. The tactic of preference, women moral reformers agreed, was to educate children, especially young male children, to a literal adherence to the Seventh C o m m a n d m e n t . This was a mother's task. American mothers, the Advocate's editors repeated endlessly, must educate their sons to reject the double standard. No child was too young, no efforts too diligent in this crucial aspect of socialization/ 0 The true foundations of such a successful effort lay in an early and highly pietistic religious education and in the inculcation of a related imperative—the son's absolute and unquestioned obedience to his mother's will. "Obedience, entire and unquestioned, must be secured, or all is lost." The mother must devote herself whole-heartedly to this task for self-will in a child was an ever-recurring evil.41 "Let us watch over them c o n t i n u a l l y . . . . Let us . . . teach them when they go out and when they come in—when they lie down, and when they rise up. . . ," 4 2 A son must learn to confide in his mother instinctively; no thought should be hidden from her. Explicit education in the Seventh Commandment itself should begin quite early for bitter experience had shown that no child was too young for such sensual temptation. 4 3 As her son grew older, his mother was urged to instill in him a love for the quiet of domesticity, a repugnance for the unnatural excitements of the theater and tavern. H e should be taught to prefer home and the companionship of pious women to the temptations of bachelor life. 44 The final step in a young man's moral education would '"The Society appears to have begun its lobbying crusade in 1838. N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes, Oct. 24, 1838, Jan. 4, 1842, Feb. 18, 1842, A p r . 25, 1844, J a n . 8, 1845"; American Female Moral R e f o r m Society (the Society adopted this name in 1839), Tenth Annual Report for . . . 1844, pp. 9 - 1 1 ; American Female Moral R e f o r m Soc., Fourteenth Annual Report for.. . I84S. " T h e N . Y . F . M . R . S . ' s Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes for the years 1837, 1838, 1843 and 1844 especially are filled with instances of the c o m m i t t e e instituting suits against seducers for d a m a g e s in the case of loss of services. "'Advocate, I (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 6 - 7 ; 4 (Jan. 1, 1838), 1. "Advocate. 10 (Feb. 1, 1844), 17-18; Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 1, 1850), 3-4. "Advocate. 10 (Jan. 1, 1844), 7 -8. "Advocate, 2 (Jan. 1836), 3; Advocate, 4 (Jan. 15, 1838), 13. "Advocate, 4 (Jan. I. 1838), 1-2; Advocate, 10 (Feb. 15, 1844), 26; Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 15, 1850), 15.

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come one evening shortly before he was to leave home for the first time. That night, the Advocate advised its readers, the mother must spend a long earnest time at his bedside (ordinarily in the dark to hide her natural blushes) discussing the importance of maintaining his sexual purity and the temptations he would inevitably face in attempting to remain true to his mother's religious principles." Mothers, not fathers, were urged to supervise the sexual education of sons. Mothers, the Society argued, spent most time with their children; fathers were usually occupied with business concerns and found little time for their children. Sons were naturally close to their mothers and devoted maternal supervision would cement these natural ties. A mother devoted to the moral reform cause could be trusted to teach her son to reject the traditional ethos of masculinity and accept the higher—more feminine— code of Christianity. A son thus educated would be inevitably a recruit in the women's crusade against sexual license. 46 The Society's general program of exposure and ostracism, lobbying and education depended for effectiveness upon the creation of a national association of militant and pious women. In the fall of 1834, but a few months after they had organized their Society, its New York officers began to create such a woman's organization. At first they worked through the Advocate and the small network of sympathizers John McDowall's efforts had created. By the spring of 183S, however, they were able to hire a minister to travel through western New York State "in behalf of Moral Reform causes." 47 The following year the committee sent two female missionaries, the editor of the Society's newspaper and a paid female agent, on a thousand-mile tour of the New England states. Visiting women's groups and churches in Brattleboro, Deerfield, Northampton, Pittsfield, the Stockbridges and many other towns, the ladies rallied their sisters to the moral reform cause and helped organize some forty-one new auxiliaries. Each succeeding summer saw similar trips by paid agents and managers of the Society throughout New York State and New England.48 By 1839, the New York Female Moral Reform Society

"Advocate. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 5-6. "An editorial in the Advocate typified the Society's emphasis on the importance of child rearing and religious education as an exclusively maternal role. " T o a mother.—You have a child on your k n e e . . . . It is an immortal being; destined to live forever! . . . And who is to make it happy or miserable? You—the mother! You who gave it birth, the mother of its body, . . . its destiny is placed in your hands" (Advocate, 10 [Jan. I, 1844], 8). "N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes, June 25, 1835." "N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes, Oct. 4, 1836, and May 22, 1837, and Sept. II, 1839." Indeed, as early as 1833 a substantial portion of John McDowall's support seemed to come from rural areas. See, for example, McDowall's Journal, 1 (Aug. 1833), 59-62.

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boasted some 445 female auxiliaries, principally in greater New England.49 So successful were these efforts that within a few years the bulk of the Society's membership and financial support came from its auxiliaries. In February 1838, the executive committee voted to invite representatives of these auxiliaries to attend the Society's annual meeting. The following year the New York Society voted at its annual convention to reorganize as a national society—the American Female Moral Reform Society; the New York group would be simply one of its many constituent societies. 50 This rural support was an indispensable part of the moral reform movement. The local auxiliaries held regular meetings in churches, persuaded hesitant ministers to preach on the Seventh Commandment, urged Sunday school teachers to confront this embarrassing but vital question. They raised money for the executive committee's ambitious projects, convinced at least some men to form male moral reform societies, and did their utmost to ostracize suspected lechers. When the American Female Moral Reform Society decided to mount a campaign to induce the New York State legislature to pass a law making seduction a criminal offense, the Society's hundreds of rural auxiliaries wrote regularly to their legislators, circulated petitions and joined their New York City sisters in Albany to lobby for the bill (which was finally passed in 1848).51 In addition to such financial and practical aid, members of the moral reform society's rural branches contributed another crucial, if less tangible, element to the reform movement. This was their commitment to the creation of a feeling of sisterhood among all morally dedicated women. Letters from individuals to the Advocate and reports from auxiliaries make clear, sometimes even in the most explicit terms, that many American women experienced a depressing sense of isolation. In part, this feeling merely reflected a physical reality for women living in rural communities. But since city- and town-dwelling women voiced similar complaints, I would like to suggest that this consciousness of isolation also reflected a sense of status inferiority. Confined by their non-maleness, antebellum American women lived within the concentric structure of a family organized around the needs and status of husbands or fathers. And such social isolation within the family—or perhaps more accurately a lack of autonomy both embodied in and symbolized by such isolation—not only dramatized, " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes, Oct. 4, 1838"; Northrup, Record, p. 22. " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes, May 10, 1839"; N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Quarterly Meeting, July, 1839." Power within the new national organization was divided so that the president and the board of managers were members of the N.Y.F.M.R.S. while the vice presidents were chosen from the rural auxiliaries. The annual meeting was held in New York City, the quarterly meetings in one of the towns of Greater New England. "Virtually every issue of the Advocate is filled with letters and reports from the auxiliaries discussing their many activities.

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but partially constituted, a differentiation in status.* 2 The fact that social values and attitudes were established by men and oriented to male experiences only exacerbated women's feelings of inferiority and irrelevance. Again and again the Society's members were to express their desire for a feminine-sororial community which might help break down this isolation, lighten the monotony and harshness of life, and establish a countersystem of female values and priorities. The New York Female Moral Reform Society quite consciously sought to inspire in its members a sense of solidarity in a cause peculiar to their sex, and demanding total commitment, to give them a sense of worthiness and autonomy outside woman's traditionally confining role. Its members, their officers forcefully declared, formed a united phalanx twenty thousand strong, " A UNION OF SENTIMENT AND EFFORT AMONG . . . VIRTUOUS FEMALES FROM MAINE ΤΟ A L A B A M A . " " The officers of the New York Society were particularly conscious of the emotional importance of female solidarity within their movement—and the significant role that they as leaders played in the lives of their rural supporters. "Thousands are looking to us," the executive committee recorded in their minutes Math mingled pride and responsibility, "with the expectation that the principles we have adopted, and the example we have set before the world will continue to be held up & they reasonably expect to witness our united onward movements till the conflict shall end in Victory." 54 For many of the Society's scattered members, the moral reform cause was their only contact with the world outside farm or village—the Advocate perhaps the only newspaper received by the family." A sense of solidarity and of emotional affiliation permeated the correspondence between " T h e view that many women held of their role is perhaps captured in the remarks of an editorialist in the Advocate in 18S0. Motherhood was unquestionably the most correct and important role for women. But it was a very hard role. " I n their [mothers'] daily rounds of duty they may move in a retired sphere—secluded from public observation, oppressed with many cares and toils, and sometimes tempted to view their position as being adverse to the highest usefulness. The youthful group around them tax their energies to the utmost limit—the wants of each and all . . . must be watched with sleepless vigilance; improvement is perhaps less marked and rapid than is ardently desired.. . . Patience is tried, faith called into exercise; and all the graces of the Spirit demanded, to maintain equanimity and exhibit a right example. And such with all its weight of care and responsibility is the post at which God in his providence has placed the mothers of our land." The ultimate reward of motherhood which the writer held out to her readers, significantly, was that they would be the ones to shape the character of their children. Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 15, 1850), 13. " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , Guardian, p. 8. " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes, Oct. 24, 1836." , " S e e two letters, for example, to the Advocate from rural subscribers. Although written fifteen years apart and from quite different geographic areas (the first from Hartford, Conn., the second from Jefferson, III.), the sentiments expressed are remarkably similar. Letter in Advocate, 1 (Apr. 1835), 19; Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 15, 1850), 14.

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rural members and the executive committee. Letters and even official reports inevitably began with the salutation, "Sisters," "Dear Sisters" or "Beloved Sisters." Almost every letter and report expressed the deep affection Society members felt for their like-thinking sisters in the cause of moral reform—even if their contact came only through letters and the Advocate. " I now pray and will not cease to pray," a woman in Syracuse, New York, wrote, "that your hearts may be encouraged and your hands strengthened." 5 8 Letters to the Society's executive committee often promised unfailing loyalty and friendship; members and leaders pledged themselves ever ready to aid either local societies or an individual sister in need." Many letters from geographically isolated women reported that the Society made it possible for them for the first time to communicate with like-minded women. A few, in agitated terms, wrote about painful experiences with the double standard which only their correspondence with the Advocate allowed them to express and share.* 8 Most significantly, the letters expressed a new consciousness of power. The moral reform society was based on the assertion of female moral superiority and the right and ability of women to reshape male behavior.5* No longer did women have to remain passive and isolated within the structuring presence of husband or father. The moral reform movement was, perhaps for the first time, a movement within which women could forge a sense of their own identity. And its founders had no intention of relinquishing their new-found feeling of solidarity and autonomy. A few years after the Society was founded, for example, a group of male evangelicals established a Seventh Commandment Society. They promptly wrote to the Female Moral Reform Society suggesting helpfully that since men had organized, the ladies could now disband; moral reform was clearly an area of questionable propriety. The New York executive committee responded quickly, firmly—and negaw Letter in Advocate, 4 (Jan. I, 1838), 6. " L e t t e r s and reports from rural supporters expressing such sentiments dotted every issue of the Advocate from its founding until the mid-l850s. " T h e editors of the Advocate not infrequently received (and printed) letters from rural subscribers reporting painfully how some young woman in their family had suffered social censure and ostracism because of the machinations of some lecher—who emerged from the affair with his respectability unblemished. This letter to the Advocate was the first time they could express the anguish and anger they felt. For one particularly pertinent example see an anonymous letter to the Advocate, 1 (Mar. 1835), 15-16. " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes, Oct. 4, 1836"; Advocate, 1 (Apr. 1835), 19-20; Advocate, 3 (Jan. 15, 1837), 194; Advocate, 4 (Jan. I, 1838), 5, 7-8; Advocate. 4 (Apr. 1838), 6-7. An integral part of this expression of power was the women's insistence that they had the right to investigate male sexual practices and norms. No longer would they permit men to tell them that particular questions were improper for women's consideration. See for example. N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Circular to the Women of the United States," rpr. in Advocate, 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1835), 6 - 7 , 4 .

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lively. Women throughout America, they wrote, had placed their trust in a female moral reform society and in female officers. Women, they informed the men, believed in both their own right and ability to combat the problem; it was decidedly a woman's, not a man's issue. 60 "The paper is now in the right hands," one rural subscriber wrote: "This is the appropriate work for women.... Go on Ladies, go on, in the strength of the Lord."81 In some ways, indeed, the New York Female Moral Reform Society could be considered a militant woman's organization. Although it was not overtly part of the woman's rights movement, it did concern itself with a number of feminist issues, especially those relating to woman's economic role. Society, the Advocate's editors argued, had unjustly confined women to domestic tasks. There were many jobs in society that women could and should be trained to fill. They could perform any light indoor work as well as men. In such positions—as clerks and artisans—they would receive decent wages and consequent self-respect. 62 And this economic emphasis was no arbitrary or inappropriate one, the Society contended. Thousands of women simply had to work; widows, orphaned young women, wives and mothers whose husbands could not work because of illness or intemperance had to support themselves and their children. Unfortunately, they had now to exercise these responsibilities on the pathetically inadequate salaries they received as domestics, washerwomen or seamstresses— crowded, underpaid and physically unpleasant occupations. 63 By the end of the 1840s, the Society had adopted the cause of the working woman and made it one of their principal concerns—in the 1850s even urging women to join unions and, when mechanization came to the garment industry, helping underpaid seamstresses rent sewing machines at low rates. 64 The Society sought consciously, moreover, to demonstrate woman's ability to perform successfully in fields traditionally reserved for men. Quite early in their history they adopted the policy of hiring only women em" N . Y . F . M . R . S . . "Executive C o m m i t t e e Minutes, J u n e 28, 1837." "'Letter in Advocate, 1 (Apr. 1835), 19. "Advocate and Guardian. 16 (Jan. 15, 1850), 9. "Advocate, 1 ( M a y 1835), 38; N . Y . F . M . R . S . . Guardian, pp. 5 - 6 . T h e Society initially became concerned with the problems of the city's poor and working women as a result of efforts to attack some of the economic causes of prostitution. The Society feared t h a t the low wages paid seamstresses, domestics or washerwomen (New Y o r k ' s t h r e e traditional female occupations) might force otherwise moral women to turn to prostitution. T h e Society was, for example, among the earliest critics of the low wages and bad working conditions of New York's g a r m e n t industry. "Significantly, the Society's editors and officers placed the responsibility for the low wages paid s e a m s t r e s s e s and o t h e r female workers on ruthless and exploitative men. Much the same tone of anti-male hostility is evident in their economic exposes as in their sexual exposes.

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ployees. From the first, of course, only women had been officers and managers of the Society. And after a few years, these officers began to hire women in preference to men as agents and to urge other charitable societies and government agencies to do likewise. (They did this although the only salaried charitable positions held by women in this period tended to be those of teachers in girls' schools or supervisors of women's wings in hospitals and homes for juvenile delinquents.) In February 1835, for instance, the executive committee hired a woman agent to solicit subscriptions to the Advocate. That summer they hired another woman to travel through New England and New York State organizing auxiliaries and giving speeches to women on moral reform. In October of 1836, the executive officers appointed two women as editors of their journal—undoubtedly among the first of their sex in this country to hold such positions." In 1841, the executive committee decided to replace their male financial agent with a woman bookkeeper. By 1843 women even set type and did the folding for the Society's journal. All these jobs, the ladies proudly, indeed aggressively stressed, were appropriate tasks for women." The broad feminist implications of such statements and actions must have been apparent to the officers of the New York Society. And indeed the Society's executive committee maintained discreet but active ties with the broader woman's rights movement of the 1830s, 40's and 50s; at one point at least, they flirted with official endorsement of a bold woman's rights position. Evidence of this flirtation can be seen in the minutes of the executive committee and occasionally came to light in articles and editorials appearing in the Advocate. As early as the mid-1830s, for instance, the executive committee began to correspond with a number of women who were then or were later to become active in the woman's rights movement. Lucretia Mott, abolitionist and pioneer feminist, was a founder and secretary of the Philadelphia Female Moral Reform Society; as such she was in frequent communication with the New York executive committee. 67 Emma Willard, a militant advocate of women's education and " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes. Feb. 20, 1835, Oct. 4 and Oct. 5, 1836"; N.Y.F.M.R.S., Fifth Annual Report, p. 5. "A.F.G.S., Eleventh Annual Report, pp. 5-6. For details of replacing male employees with women and the bitterness of the male reactions, see N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes," passim, for early 1843. Nevertheless, even these aggressively feminist women did not feel that women could with propriety chair public meetings, even those of their own Society. In 1838. for instance, when the ladies discovered that men expected to attend their annual meeting, they felt that they had to ask men to chair the meeting and read the women's reports. Their decision was made just after the G r i m k l sisters had created a storm of controversy by speaking at large mixed gatherings of men and women. Northrup, Record, pp. 21-25. For the experiences of the Grimke sisters with this same problem, see Gerda Lerner's excellent biography. The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), chaps. 11-14. " N . Y . F . M . R . S . , "Executive Committee Minutes, Aug. 3, 1837."

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founder of the Troy Female Seminary, was another of the executive committee's regular correspondents. Significantly, when Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in either the United States or Great Britain, received her medical degree, Emma Willard wrote to the New York executive committee asking its members to use their influence to find her a job.6® The Society did more than that. The Advocate featured a story dramatizing Dr. Blackwell's struggles. The door was now open for other women, the editors urged; medicine was a peculiarly appropriate profession for sensitive and sympathetic womankind. The Society offered to help interested women in securing admission to medical school." 9 One of the most controversial aspects of the early woman's rights movement was its criticism of the subservient role of women within the American family, and of the American man's imperious and domineering behavior toward women. Much of the Society's rhetorical onslaught upon the male's lack of sexual accountability served as a screen for a more general— and less socially acceptable—resentment of masculine social preeminence. Occasionally, however, the Advocate expressed such resentment overtly. An editorial in 1838, for example, revealed a deeply felt antagonism toward the power asserted by husbands over their wives and children. "A portion of the inhabitants of this favored land," the Society admonished, "are groaning under a despotism, which seems to be modeled precisely after that of the Autocrat of R u s s i a . . . . We allude to the tyranny exercised in the HOME department, where lordly man, 'clothed with a little brief authority,' rules his trembling subjects with a rod of iron, conscious of entire impunity, and exalting in his fancied superiority." The Society's editorialist continued, perhaps even more bitterly: "Instead of regarding his wife as a help-mate for him, an equal sharer in his joys and sorrows, he looks upon her as a useful article of furniture, which is valuable only for the benefit derived from it, but which may be thrown aside at pleasure." 70 Such behavior, the editorial carefully emphasized, was not only commonplace, experienced by many of the Society's own members—even the wives of "Christians" and of ministers—but was accepted and even justified by society; was it not sanctioned by the Bible? At about the same time, indeed, the editors of the Advocate went so far as to print an attack upon "masculine" translations and interpretations of the Bible, and especially of Paul's epistles. This appeared in a lengthy article written by Sarah Grimke, a "notorious" feminist and abolitionist. 71 "N.Y.F.M.R.S., "Executive Committee Minutes, June 2, 1847, Mar. 28, 1849." The Advocate regularly reviewed her books, and indeed made a point of reviewing books by women authors. '•'Advocate and Guardian, 16 (Jan. 15, 1850), 10. '"Advocate, 4 (Feb. 15, 1838), 28. "See Lerner, The Grimkt Sisters.

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The executive committee clearly sought to associate their organization more closely with the nascent woman's rights movement. Calling upon American women to read and interpret the Bible for themselves, Sarah Grimke asserted that God had created woman the absolute equal of man. But throughout history, man, being stronger, had usurped woman's natural rights. He had subjected wives and daughters to his physical control and had evolved religious and scientific rationalizations to justify this domination. "Men have endeavored to entice, or to drive women from almost every sphere of moral action.*' Miss Grimke charged: " 'Go home and spin' is the . . . advice of the domestic t y r a n t . . . . The first duty, I believe, which devolves on our sex now is to think for t h e m s e l v e s . . . . Until we take our stand side by side with our brother; until we read all the precepts of the Bible as addressed to woman as well as to man, and lose . . . the consciousness of sex, we shall never fulfil the end of our existence." "Those who do undertake to labor," Miss G r i m k i wrote from her own and her sister's bitter experiences, " a r e the scorn and ridicule of their own and the other sex." "We are so little accustomed to think for ourselves," she continued, that we submit to the dictum of prejudice, and of usurped authority, almost without an effort to redeem ourselves from the unhallowed shackles which have so long bound us; almost without a desire to rise from that degradation and bondage to which we have been consigned by man, and by which the faculties of our minds, and the powers of our spiritual nature, have been prevented from expanding to their full growth, and are sometimes wholly crushed. Each woman must re-evaluate her role in society; no longer could she depend on husband or father to assume her responsibilities as a free individual. No longer, Sarah G r i m k i argued, could she be satisfied with simply caring for her family or setting a handsome table. 72 The officers of the Society, in an editorial comment following this article, admitted that she had written a radical critique of woman's traditional role. But they urged their members, "It is of immense importance to our sex to possess clear and correct ideas of our rights and duties." 7 3 Sarah Grimki's overt criticism of woman's traditional role, containing as it did an attack upon the Protestant ministry and orthodox interpretations of the Bible, went far beyond the consensus of the Advocate's rural subscribers. The following issue contained several letters sharply critical of her and of the managers, for printing her editorial. 74 And indeed the Advocate never again published the work of an overt feminist. Their mem:

'Advocate, 4 (Jan. 1, 1838), 3 5. -'Ibid., p. 5. "See. for example. Advocate. 4 (Apr. I, 1838), 55; 4 (July 16, 1838), 108.

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bership, the officers concluded, would not tolerate explicit attacks upon traditional family structure and orthodox Christianity. Anti-male resentment and anger had to be expressed covertly. It was perhaps too threatening or—realistically—too dangerous for respectable matrons in relatively close-knit semi-rural communities in New York, New England, Ohio or Wisconsin so openly to question the traditional relations of the sexes and demand a new and ominously forceful role for women. The compromise the membership and the officers of the Society seemed to find most comfortable was one that kept the American woman within the home—but which greatly expanded her powers as pious wife and mother. In rejecting Sarah Grimk£'s feminist manifesto, the Society's members implicitly agreed to accept the role traditionally assigned woman: the self-sacrificing, supportive, determinedly chaste wife and mother who limited her "sphere" to domesticity and religion. But in these areas her power should be paramount. The mother, not the father, should have final control of the home and family—especially of the religious and moral education of her children. If the world of economics and public affairs was his, the home must be hers." And even outside the home, woman's peculiar moral endowment and responsibilities justified her in playing an increasingly expansive role, one which might well ultimately impair aspects of man's traditional autonomy. When man transgressed God's commandments, through licentiousness, religious apathy, the defense of slavery, or the sin of intemperance— woman had both the right and duty of leaving the confines of the home and working to purify the male world. The membership of the New York Female Moral Reform Society chose not to openly espouse the woman's rights movement. Yet many interesting emotional parallels remain to link the moral reform crusade and the suffrage movement of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the Grimkd sisters and Susan B. Anthony. In its own way, indeed, the war for purification of sexual mores was far more fundamental in its implications for woman's traditional role than the demand for woman's education—or even the vote. Many of the needs and attitudes, moreover, expressed by suffragette leaders at the Seneca Falls Convention and in their efforts in the generation following are found decades earlier in the letters of rural women in the Advocate of Moral Reform. Both groups found wopian's traditionally passive role intolerable. Both wished to assert female worth and values in a heretofore entirely male world. Both welcomed the creation of a sense of feminine loyalty and sisterhood that could give emotional strength and " F o r examples of t h e glorification of the m a t e r n a l role see Advocate, 47 and Advocate and Guardian, l 6 ( J a n . 15, 1850), 13-14.

10 ( M a r . 15, 1844),

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comfort to women isolated within their homes—whether in a remote farmstead or a Gramercy Park mansion. And it can hardly be assumed that the demand for votes for women was appreciably more radical than a moral absolutism which encouraged women to invade bordellos, befriend harlots and publicly discuss rape, seduction and prostitution. It is important as well to re-emphasize a more general historical perspective. When the pious women founders of the Moral Reform Society gathered at the Third Free Presbyterian Church, it was fourteen years before the Seneca Falls Convention—which has traditionally been accepted as the beginning of the woman's rights movement in the United States. There simply was no woman's movement in the 1830s. The future leaders were either still adolescents or just becoming dissatisfied with aspects of their role. Women advocates of moral reform were among the very first American women to challenge their completely passive, homeoriented image. They were among the first to travel throughout the country without male chaperones. They published, financed, even set type for their own paper and defied a bitter and long-standing male opposition to their cause. They began, in short, to create a broader, less constricted sense of female identity. Naturally enough, they were dependent upon the activist impulse and legitimating imperatives of evangelical religion. This was indeed a complex symbiosis, the energies of pietism and the grievances of role discontent creating the new and activist female consciousness which characterized the history of the American Female Moral Reform Society in antebellum America. Their experience, moreover, was probably shared, though less overtly, by the thousands of women who devoted time and money to the great number of reform causes which multiplied in Jacksonian America. Women in the abolition and the temperance movements (and to a less extent in more narrowly evangelical and religious causes) also developed a sense of their ability to judge for themselves and of their right to publicly criticize the values of the larger society. The lives and self-image of all these women had changed—if only so little—because of their new reforming interests.

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THE POWER OF WOMEN'S NETWORKS: A CASE STUDY OF FEMALE MORAL REFORM IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

MARY P. RYAN

One of the first impulses of the feminist historians in the early 1970s who set about discovering women's past was simply to chart the course of sexual inequality and the oppression of women. The advances of women's scholarship since then have raised more complicated historical issues. Women's historians are now looking to the past for evidence of women's power and autonomy rather than their simple subordination. Within segregated female spheres and women's networks they have discerned evidence of the ability of women to maximize their freedom and exert considerable social influence. This trend in women's history has given new currency to Mary Beard's notion, first enunciated in the 1940s, that contrary to being oppressed and victimized, women have acted throughout the American past to shape events and to make history. This scholarly perspective has given us a richer, multi-dimensional picture of women's history. There are, at the same time, some hazards inherent in this emphasis on women's culture and women's power. The first possible risk is that by exonerating the women of the past from the charge of being eternal victims and passive objects of history, we will also lose sight of the societal inequality which has consistently marked womanhood and been a central component of nearly every sex/gender system. Secondly, we are in some danger of oversimplifying the historical process. If women are a force in history, if they make their own history, then we must also face the possibility that females have participated in creating and reproducing the less-sanguine aspects of the gender system. We are now in a position, after scarcely a decade of intense research, to recognize women as full agents in history, who for all their power and freedom have not circumvented the constraints, ironies, and contradictions that confront human beings in the past and into the future. 1 This paper explores one manifestation of this more complex historical relationship drawn from the annals of antebellum American

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reform movements. The American Female Moral Reforrft Society seems to represent women entering history in a powerful, militant, some have said feminist posture. More than 400 chapters of the national moral reform association grew up throughout New England and the Middle-Atlantic States in the 1830s and 40s. Their goal was to reform standards of sexual morality and regulate sexual behavior in their communities. They assailed the double standard, forcefully pursued and exposed licentious men, and extended their protection to seduced women and reformed prostitutes. In Female Moral Reform, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has found expressions of women's discontent with their assigned sphere, contempt for tyrannical males and militant defense of members of their own sex. More recently, Barbara Berg has relied heavily on the records of the American Female Moral Reform Society to argue that the origins of American feminism lay not in the abolitionist movement but in the women's benevolent organizations that flourished in the nineteenth-century city and often dated from an earlier period.1 At the same time any casual reader of the Society's periodical, The Advocate of Moral Reform, will also notice a contrary tendency. The Advocate reveled in portraying the innate purity, domestic virtue, and maternal priorities of the female sex. In fact they were among the earliest and most enthusiastic exponents of these features of the nineteenth-century stereotype of "true womanhood." Female Moral Reform, in other words, presents two apparently contradictory uses of woman's power: to attack the double standard, on the one hand, and to celebrate a domestic feminine stereotype, on the other. Thus the case of Female Moral Reform offers an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between women's power and the history of the sex/gender system. It may illuminate the nature, sources, and ambiguous historical impact of women's efforts to exert influence on society at large. This historical objective is best achieved by minute analysis at the level of local reform organization. This narrow but sensitive compass can locate the specific origins of the female moral reformers' power. The focus of this inquiry is a chapter of the American Female Moral Reform Society founded in Utica, New York in 1837. The Utica Society was also served by rural tributaries, including chapters in such satellite farming and factory villages as Whitesboro, Clinton, New York Mills, and Westmoreland. In the 1830s and 40s, Utica and these surrounding towns of Oneida County were alive with moral reform, and consequently prolific of documents for historians of women. Female moral reform grew up in the interstices of the expanding agricultural market economy which centered in the village of Utica.

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As late as 1800, Utica was merely a river crossing and trading post situated in the midst of a few pioneer homesteads. The commercial preeminence of the town was established in the 1820s when it became a port along the Erie Canal, bustling with trade and exploding with a population of eight thousand. By the mid 1830s, the canal boom had subsided and the population stabilized at around twelve thousand people. The majority of the employed males of the newly incorporated city made their livelihoods as small merchants or manufacturers—shopkeepers and artisans who served the nearby commercial farmers. Utica also boasted a number of banks and insurance companies; many stockholders in the nearby railroads and textile factories; and a bevy of ambitious entrepreneurs, large and small, who proudly announced themselves as capitalists. Just on the outskirts of the town stood the industrial village of New York Mills, one of the nation's largest textile producers outside of New England. Yet neither large-scale manufacturing nor wage labor dominated local economic activity. Rather the small independent producer, whether a farmer or artisan, characterized the regional economy and made Utica a bustling, open marketplace. 3 At this precise historical moment-while still a small, youthful, preindustrial, but flourishing, market economy—Utica earned its place of moderate renown in American social history. The plethora of religious revivals and reform activity which Whitney Cross protrayed in his classic study, The Burned-Over District, originated in and around Oneida County. The region had been overrun with evangelism since the first settlers arrived from New England in the late eighteenth century. The inaugural Christian benevolent association, a missionary society, was founded in Utica in 1806, and the long, lively, revival cycle ensued soon thereafter: beginning in 1814, peaking in 1826, and dissipating late in the 1830s. It was in the 1830s and 40s that the "Burned-Over District" spawned the species of reform organization to which female moral reform properly belongs. The city directory for 1832 listed no less than forty-one voluntary associations. These groups performed a multitude of community functions; care of the poor, instruction of children, self-improvement of young men, and simple conviviality for their members. 4 The first associations, founded at the turn of the century, generally united men or women of elite status in order to perform community services, such as providing relief for the poor in a condescending fashion. The voluntary associations of the 1830s were set up for a different purpose—to reform individuals and institutions—and exhibited a new mode of organizing. Most were congregations of peers: members of similar age groups, occupations,

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and ethnic backgrounds. Most rejected a rigid governing hierarchy and condescending manners. The Washingtonian Temperance Union was the most extreme expression of this leveling tendency, enthusiastically welcoming even acknowledged inebriates into its fraternal embrace. All these associations occupied a distinctive space in the social order of the community, somewhere along a muted boundary between private and public life. The "association" or "society" as it was alternately called, was clearly not an enclosed private space. Yet it was not exactly public, at least not in the way Utica's New England founders used the term: to designate the formal institutions of town and church where male heads of households met to exercise official authority. Rather, the association relied on informal but expansive social ties, a voluntary network of like-minded individuals, as its organizational machinery and political leverage. Combined, these associations actually functioned as a major structure of social organization for Utica in the 1830s and 40s. Whatever the community n e e d - b e it police or fire protection, a new industry, poor relief, education, an o r p h a n a g e some association rose to meet it. Social organizations of this nature are particularly receptive to female participation. Sex, first of all, was a legitimate common characteristic around which to form an association of peers. Furthermore, the blurred distinction between private and public space which characterized the association effectively removed a barricade which so often consigned females to domestic confinement. Finally, the social organization of the 1830s and 40s worked through informal personal associations, the sustained, everyday contacts between neighbors and kin, social networks which were especially familiar and comfortable to women. Thus it is not surprising that one in three of Utica's associations was a congregation of females. Women's associations were formed, beginning in the first decade of the nineteenth century, for a variety of purposes: to support the frontier ministry, to educate poor children, to circulate religious tracts. Soon women began to organize in a more democratic manner and in a spirit of mutuality rather than noblesse oblige. Groups such as the Maternal Association, the Daughters of Temperance, and the Female Moral Reform Society were all dedicated to serving the reciprocal needs of the members themselves, especially in rearing their children and ridding their homes of vice. All these groups assumed a basic commonality between their members and those they might serve. The victims of alcohol or lechery were all perceived as errant children of the same Protestant, nativebom, industrious and respectable culture. In sum women were among the most active participants in the rich social life that trans-

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

pired within the voluntary associations, that American mode of antebellum social organization that so fascinated De Tocqueville. It could also be argued, in the case of Utica at least, that women played a formative role in creating the associational system. The region's first voluntary benevolent organization was the Female Charitable Society. The prototype of the more democratic associations was the Maternal Association which predated its male analogue, the Washingtonian Temperance Union, by over a decade. At any rate, the social order of antebellum Utica and environs was replete with women's organizations, of which the Female Moral Reform Society was only one special case. The immediate antecedent of Female Moral Reform appeared in Oneida County early in the 1830s when John McDowall of New York City alerted the local population to the need to control seduction, prostitution, and obscenity. The very first issue of McDowall's Journal, appearing in 1833, recorded a ground swell of support in the city of Utica. The Journal reported individual donations from city residents as well as contributions from associated women, such as the "Female Benevolent Society of Utica." Moral as well as financial support soon followed. Mrs. Abigail Whitellsey, the editor of the Mother's Magazine, another offshoot of the women's organizations of Utica, also sent her appreciation and endorsement. Tokens of support also came from anonymous women, such as,"a Lady from Utica" who poignantly offered up "Two rings and a breast pin" to help finance the cause. The small towns outside Utica were the first to mobilize behind moral reform. Whitesboro had a chapter of the American Female Moral Reform Society as of 1835 which enrolled approximately 40 members. By 1837 when the Utica Society was formally established, the chapters in Clinton and Westmoreland had acquired a membership of 84 and 181, respectively. The 100-member Utica association pledged to wage a pious women's crusade: "we do feel dear sisters" announced the first annual report of the Utica Female Moral Reform Society, "that we have enlisted in the warfare for life and that we are not at liberty to lay down the armor till called upon by death to other services. " s The names of only a handful of the Utica reformers have been recorded on an occasional circular or newspaper account. These few identifiable members, however, represented a relatively wide range of women from the middling and upper classes. Wives of artisans joined those of merchants and prominent attorneys. Two seamstresses brought the interests of wage-eaming women into the society. Although veterans of evangelical reform based in the Utica First Presbyterian Church formed the core of the Female Moral

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM Reform Society, women of Baptist affiliations also joined the ranks. The single and the widowed, furthermore, joined with middle-aged wives and mothers in the moral crusade. 6 Finally, it should be noted that the rural areas of Oneida County, including both farming communities and industrial villages, displayed equal, if not greater, enthusiasm for female moral reform than did the city proper. What then stimulated women from such a broad spectrum of the population to take an interest in moral reform? It might be expected that these women were simply reacting to a sudden upsurge in the incidence of "adultery and seduction," the species of vice which they were most determined to eradicate. Yet a survey conducted by the Utica Society in 1843 uncovered a paltry record of sexual offenses: nine cases of illegitimacy and two arrests for prostitution. Although no more refined estimate of the frequency of sexual relations outside of marriage is available for Oneida County, there are some indications that the rate of sexual license was actually on the decline in the Northeastern United States. Analysis of vital statistics and church records suggest that the proportion of births conceived before marriage had peaked in the late eighteenth century and actually reached its nadir in the era of moral reform. 7 These statistics, however, hint at more complex changes in sexual behavior than a simple decrease in premarital sexual relations. These cases of premarital sex were exposed by examining genealogical records, proceeding, couple by couple, to simply subtract the number of months between the date of marriage and the date of first birth. Premarital sex which did not culminate in a marriage record, then, is not recorded by these statistics. Hence, it may be that the young women and men of Oneida County and the Northeastern United States were engaging in sex outside of marriage at the same, or even a higher rate than in previous decades, but were now evading marriage to their sex partners. If this were true then the decline in "early births" may indicate not a lower incidence of premarital sex, but, rather, the breakdown of those methods of social control which formerly insured that illicit intercourse and conception usually culminated in matrimony. This second interpretation of changing sexual behavior in antebellum America is substantiated by evidence from Oneida County. Although the actual level of premarital sex cannot be accurately determined, it is quite clear that the community's ability to monitor and regulate such behavior had eroded substantially. After 1830, neither the church nor the family retained its former control over private sexual activity. Before then the local churches, Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian alike, regularly called their members

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES to account for committing fornication and adultery. Seducers and adulterers were brought before the elders of the church t o confess their sins, vow to change their ways or be excommunicated. Early in the 1830s, after heated ecclesiastical debates too complicated to recount here, the local churches discontinued this method of enforcing sexual morality. 8 At the same time, the rapid increase in the population of Utica and its increasing religious diversity prevented a single church (including the once-ruling Presbyterians) from overseeing the sexual behavior of the entire town. At the same time parents' ability to restrict the sexual activity of their daughters and sons was being undermined by the extreme geographical mobility of the commercial era. The population of Utica quadrupled between 1820 and 1840, due in large part to the influx of young men and women unaccompanied by their parents. One-quarter of the city's population was between the ages.of fifteen and thirty; as much as 30 percent of all those listed in the city directory called themselves boarders, most of whom were young men living apart from their kin. Many of these young urban dwellers were migrants from rural Oneida County where after the exhaustion of unimproved agricultural land in the 1820s, parents could no longer provide a livelihood for all their progeny on nearby farms. Thus Utica was inundated with young unsupervised men and women seeking jobs as clerks, canal boys, servants, and seamstresses. The industrial village of New York Mills, meanwhile, was filling up with unchaperoned factory girls of similar origins. Parents and the deacons of the church were not available then to control or protect these young migrants. It was the Female Moral Reform Society that came to the aid of this peripatetic generation. Although the espoused goal of the society was to rout out seduction and adultery, the Utica chapter was most concerned about the former sexual transgression, the peculiar pitfall of the young and unmarried. The appearance of at least two seamstresses on the rolls of the Utica chapter represented a population of women who seldom enlisted in local reform groups. These working girls were especially vulnerable to seduction and the fateful consequences of becoming unwed mothers and may well have joined the Society for their own sexual selfprotection. The bulk of the members of the Utica chapter, however, were married women who seemed to act more out of concern for their children than their own immediate self-defense. The brothels of the city, according to the reformers were the "known cause of ruin to multitudes of the rising generation" and were responsible for "rending the hearts of fathers and mothers." One mother from Clinton wrote the Advocate of Moral Reform des-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM cribing the demographics of her interest in sexual control: "A daughter and a son have returned to their widowed mother from visiting distant cities and pined away victims of this sin" [of sexual indulgence]. The secretary of the New York Mills chapter explained the sources of maternal concern in this region as follows: "The state of society in this place is peculiar to manufacturing villages. Multitudes of youth are here collected who need light and instruction on this subject." The records of the female moral reform societies of Onieda County were most of all a repository of the anxieties of mothers. "Even our children are infested with [obscenity]," wrote the alarmed matrons. "Who amongst us have not had our hearts pained by the obscenity of little children? Who among us does not trouble at least if some who are dear to use should be led away by the thousand snares of the destroyer?" They feared for their sons as well as their daughters, whom they envisoned leaving home only to be enticed into brothels and descend therewith to the almshouse, prison, or the gallows. The female moral reformers, in sum, anticipated the dangers of unbridled sexuality in the fluid circumstances of commercial and early industrial capitalism; and they constituted themselves as a force to regulate and control such threatening behavior. 9 Female moral reform, then, constituted a concrete, specific attempt to exert woman's power. Led and initiated by women, it was a direct, collective, organized effort, which aimed to control behavior and change values in the community at large. Because female moral reform entailed explicit social action it is possible to examine its origins, impact and limitations as an exercise of woman's power. Several manifestations of this power will be identified. First of all, the case of moral reform suggests how women could use their social position in a specific time and place as leverage with which to influence others, including males. Secondly, within the Female Moral Reform Society, women can be seen giving direction to the future of their sex. Specifically, it will be argued that the members of the Female Moral Reform Society helped to lay the groundwork for the Victorian sexual code which placed particular stock in the purity of females. Finally the case of female moral reform will illustrate the proposition that associated women were a force in history at large. In this instance women played a vital role in working out the ideology of sexual control which characterized the middle classes of the nineteenth-century city. Female moral reformers, it will be seen, clearly made history and reshaped aspects of the American sex/gender system. Yet their impact on the status of women was rife with ambiguities. In the end they used their social power to create a moral code

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which exacted particularly stringent sexual repression from their own sex. How then did the women of the Female Moral Reform Society grasp the power to enact their program of purification? They began simply enough by activating the machinery of reform which had been operating in Oneida County for nearly a generation. One of the first endorsements of female moral reform was sent to McDowell's Journal by a matron calling herself "A Friend of my Species," who had arrived in Utica forty years before. For the benefit of her readers, McDowall described the correspondent as "a lady moving in the very first circle of society, a mother, a philanthropist, a Christian." 10 This writer, while anonymous to historians, was undoubtedly widely known among her Utica contemporaries. She might have been Sophia Clarke, founder of the city's Female Missionary Society and the Maternal Association, active abolitionist, and prominent member of the Presbyterian Church. Or, she may have been Mrs. Clarke's colleague, Sophia Bagg, the mistress of Bagg's Hotel who sat at the center of local society and founded the city's most august charitable institution, the Utica Orphan Asylum. Perhaps the identity of the "friend of the species" was the same as the unnamed woman who nearly rent apart the First Presbyterian church a few years previous when she censored a leading parishioner "on his political opinions." Regardless of individual identity, this matron, described as a "lady moving in the very first circle" was representative of a whole web of associations between women that had been growing and reinforcing itself since the first decade of the nineteenth century. The oldest and strongest strand in this network linked together the members of the Presbyterian church. The female parishioners were assembled at the First Presbyterian Church of Utica in 1834 when Samuel Aiken, pastor and veteran revivalist, announced from the pulpit that "a whole tribe of libertines" was about to invade the city of Utica. Aiken then turned to the females of the congregation saying, "daughters of America! Why not marshall yourselves in bands and become a terror to evil doers." 1 1 It was not until three years later that the women of Utica put this plan into operation, forming their own chapter of the American Female Moral Reform Society. Two parishioners, Fanny Skinner and Paulina Wright, played the major leadership roles in the Utica chapter. Mrs. Skinner's ties to the local network of female associations went back to 1806 and the founding of the Female Charitable Society of Whitestown. The 1830s found her embroiled in abolitionism as well as moral reform, and exploiting her personal contacts in order to convince Angelina Grimk6 Weld to speak

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM in Utica. Paulina Wright was a relative newcomer to Utica reform, yet she quickly found her way into the women's network as she peddled tracts and petitions for the Martha Washington Temperance Union as well as the Female Moral Reform Society. Her personal network of women's reform would also take her to the border of feminism. In 1836 she circulated petitions for the reform of married women's property rights in the company of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. 1 2 Again the trail of women's associations followed deeply rutted paths through local neighborhoods, churches, and reform circles.

Female moral reformers discovered a portal to public responsibility and power through the same social circle. Mrs. Whitellsey's letter to John McDowall in 1833 described a practice of moral reform which predated any formal association. Whenever she came in contact with defenseless young women, Mrs. Whitellsey resorted to this strategy: "I have either written a note or sent with them a messenger to such of my friends as might be able either to employ them themselves or direct them to others. Whether this course or some other equivalent is oftener pursued, many of the unfortunate victims of vice and wretchedness . . . would be greatly diminished." Mrs. Whitellsey was proposing that women could use the bonds of friendship which linked local households, that is, the existing female social network, as the mechanism of moral reform. The same device could be used to secure financial support for reform activity, as was inadvertently revealed by the editor of a local evangelical periodical. Charles Hastings wrote to the Advocate of Moral Religion (the periodical of the national organization) apologizing for his own inability to devote time to the worthy cause. He happily announced, however, that "A female in my family says she will go around among the families and see if she can't get something for your support." This door-to-door, woman-to-woman approach was also the means of expanding the ranks of reformers and influencing public opinion. The circulation of tracts and petitions was a routine of female organization in charities, temperance, and bible societies. In other words, female moral reform simply sent a new message, a new set of demands, through a familiar and personal network of comumnication. 13 Faced with what they saw as an epidemic of vice, female moral reformers soon entertained the notion that more heroic measures were necessary; and they began to tread outside of their familiar social circles. They formed a visiting committee in 1841 which ventured into the more unseemly haunts of the town. Entering into some of the hovels of the poor, they met a sympathetic response among Utica's mothers and wives. Poor widows tearfully

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

accepted their tracts and offered in return personal reports about sexual offenses and domestic crimes against women. The stories grew more lurid than a dime novel as these pious women of Utica encountered real-life cases of seduction and betrayal, of drunken and tyrannical husbands, and abused and battered wives. One of the visiting committee's informants told the sordid tale of her invalid neighbor. Night after night, the sick woman's husband took her nurse to his bed. This report like many others was accompanied by a remark which identified the offending man to his neighbors. "This man has the charge of a paper, the object of which is to uphold public morals," wrote the female reformer: "May we not ask how long shall men like this occupy responsible stations and be tolerated among Christian people?" Through the agency of the Female Moral Reform Society such stories transformed gossip into a public instrument of protest. 14 The reports of the visiting committee also offered examples of militant assaults upon the forces of vice. One Utica matron became a heroine of moral reform after her unilateral attack on a local brothel. She told the following story. Her son had been keeping late hours night after night while she paced, prayed, and wept for his soul. Finally she could endure such passivity no longer: She marched straight to the nearby brothel, bounded up the stairs, pounded on the door of the chamber which harbored her son, and shouted that a constable was on his way. This enraged mother was hurled down the stairs by the brothel's owner, but she returned home to find a repentant son. It was stories like these that the officers of the Female Moral Reform Society had in mind when they reported that the monthly meeting had been "rendered highly useful and interesting from the reports of the visiting committee which have been replete with heart-stirring facts and appeals." 1 s Buoyed up by encounters such as these, the reformers became even more energetic and audacious. A committee of eight women secured between two and three thousand signatures on a petition to outlaw prostitution in 1841. Another woman visited twentytwo families, in a one-month period. Ultimately the membership of Utica's Female Moral Reform Society began to encroach upon the male centers of authority. One cadre of the movement marched to city hall and demanded statistics on sex offenders. Others accosted men of dubious character on the city streets and entered taverns to interrogate bartenders. The Female Moral Reform Society even took their cause into the courts. When a young servant woman came to the Society with a report of sexual exploitation by her employer, the members acted swiftly and de-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM cisively in her defense. They brought the culprit to trial; provided the victim with legal counsel, personal support, and a new job in a respectable home. In this instance, the Utica Female Moral Reform Society acted as a special police force and public prosecutor, whose jurisdiction was sexual assaults on women. They had mobilized not only to perform a community function onoe assigned to male ministers and elders of the church, but they had also carried their moral mission outside their own congregations and into the streets and thoroughfares of Utica. 16 In the process, the new female custodians of sexual morality also altered the standards of propriety. Church trials were primarily concerned with cases of adultery, that is the infidelity of married men, and especially, women. The members of the Female Moral Reform Society, however, were most concerned about the sexual behavior of the young and unmarried and demanded stricter purity from both their sons and daughters. Moral reformers repeatedly lamented the lax standards of the recent past. For example, one reformer noted that until recently a "young boy who was not afraid to trifle with the most forward girls was esteemed above his years and almost a man." Female moral reformers would not tolerate such permissive attitudes and attempted to purge local culture of all suggestions of casual, lenient sexuality. The goal of moral reform, as the minister of a largely female congregation put it, was to eradicate all "unchaste feelings and licentious habits," not just to condemn and punish sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Toward this end, the Female Moral Reform Society instructed women to "encourage both by precept and example, simplicity with regard to dress and at their children's tables, that unseen snares are not laid which shall lead to the vice we are striving to exterminate." 17 They were, in other words, making connections between a child's dress and diet and his or her disposition to sexual indulgence in later life. The Female Moral Reform Society, as well as the overlapping membership of the local maternal associations, propounded methods of childcare which were designed to instill sexual control in the very personalities of the rising generation. They turned from external control of sexual behavior to an internalized repression of physical drives. The women of the Female Moral Reform Society of Utica had traveled a considerable ideological and social territory within a few short years. They began simply by taking advantage of a vacuum of moral authority in the commercial city and proceeded to adapt traditional and previously male-directed methods of moral surveillance to a new environment and their own interests (primarily as mothers). By the early 1840s, they had revised the code of sexu-

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES al morality and created novel and forceful methods of circulating these revised standards. Coincidentally they had opened a new social space through which their sex could maneuver for power in the community. The nature of their power is indicated by a major community conflict instigated by the female moral reformers of Utica in 1836 and 1837. The incident was one skirmish in a prolonged battle between the Female Moral Reform Society and the city's clerks. The moral reformers charged these youthful employees of stores and countinghouses with major responsibility for seduction in the city. When, for example, some members of the Society spotted the alleged perpetrators of some unnamed nocturnal infamy on a city thoroughfare, they jumped from their carriage and presented the offending clerks with a tract appropriately entitled "Run speak to that Young Man." In 1836 the Utica Society commissioned a Reverend Dodge to deliver a public lecture indicting the same class of young men on charges of licentiousness. The members of the Society were so pleased with Dodge's discourse that they published an endorsement of his remarks in the local newspaper. Suddenly they found themselves at the center of a raging local controversy. First a delegation of clerks held a public meeting and placed a newspaper advertisement to defend their good name. Then another group of citizens who also purported to represent the city's clerks rose to concur with Dodge's opinion. 18 These two broadsides displayed a growing cleavage in antebellum sexual ideology. The supporters of female moral reform proposed an old-fashioned solution to the problem of sexual license in the commercial sector of the local economy. They recommended that employers assume the responsibility for overseeing the private behavior of their clerks; and they proposed that this obligation be written into a formal contract between the merchant and his young workers, just as in the ancient practices of indenture and apprenticeship, and on that same principle of paternal surveillance which once prevailed in stable farm households. In other words, these supporters of female moral reform seemed to hark back to more traditional methods of controlling sexual behavior. They had been compelled to announce their position, however, by the actions of a novel social organization, a band of reforming fejnales who were considerably more sophisticated in their thinking about sexual questions. The clerk faction, on the other hand, rejected both paternal control of sexual behavior and the zealotry of the female reformers. As they saw it, "one of the first lessons to be learned by young men is to carry their lives and the regulator of their conduct in their own bosoms" independently of the com-

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

mands of their superiors or the moral pressure of evangelizing women. Theirs was a highly individualistic and liberal position, which proclaimed the rights of private conscience. Analysis of the signatories of these two lists reveals that these differences in sexual attitudes reflected the divergent social status of the two factions. The clerks who were appalled by Dodge's sermon garnered support from their employers and hence some of the city's largest and most influential merchants. The bulk of the signatories of the second resolution, that in support of female moral reform, turned out to be neither clerks nor the employers of clerks. In fact the largest single occupational group represented on this second document was that of artisans. The proponents and opponents of female moral reform also differed markedly in their family status. The opponents were not only clerks, but also boarders, and very often residents of the largest and most impersonal lodging houses and hotels of Utica. The allies of the Female Moral Reform Society, on the other hand, tended to reside with their biological families. Even among the minority who called themselves boarders, a significant proportion still shared a household with either their parents or their employers. In sum, the Utica Female Moral Reform Society had raised issues which divided the population by occupation as well as pattern of residence. It pitted artisans who favored a more traditional household structure against merchants and clerks who had chosen the residential pattern germane to a thriving commercial town, namely boarding. 19 Still the fact remains that both factions and a substantial portion of the community's leadership, were forced to respond to issues that had been introduced into public debate by an organized group of women. The clerks in fact felt obliged to endorse many of the values expounded by the Female Moral Reform Society. They advertised their own chastity and proclaimed it a young man's "highest interest" and "most valuable capital." The financial establishment of Utica soon issued similar demands for sexual self-control. During the 1840s, the Mercantile Agency (forerunner of Dun & Bradstreet) sentenced many a young man to business failure by denying credit on the basis of a "bad reputation" or "running after the women." 20 In the risky enterprises of the aggressively capitalistic town of Utica, self-control was one predictor of financial prudence, and soon became a measure of middle-class respectability. It would become even more important as the city industrialized after 1845 and as more and more young men and women were permanently exiled from the farms and artisan workshops where fathers once enacted direct sanctions against the sexual irregularities of their children. The progeny of

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native-born artisans and farmers would increasingly find themselves in the more solitary and insecure circumstances represented by the city clerks of the 1830s. The ideology of individual internalized sexual control first formulated and most aggressively publicized by female moral reformers eased young women and men through this transition from farm to city, from the family economy to individualized occupations. In the end then, the history of the Utica Female Moral Reform Society suggests that women could play a central and initiating role in the transformation of class and ideology. They devised and implemented sexual standards and practices which would distinguish the urban middle class from their artisan and farming parents. In sum, the events of 1837 provide a public illustration of how a few active, organized, well-situated women could exert power in history. They had a direct effect on the opinions of men and had found leverage that extended beyond their households, outside the women's networks and across the social and economic divisions within the city. In achieving their goals, the female moral reformers demonstrated a distinctive variety of women's power. This power did not take the covert and privatized form which nineteenth-century writers venerated as "women's influence." Rather the women of the Moral Reform Society set social standards, commanded public attention, and caused a major commotion right in the center of the local social system. Their power is attributable not merely to the energy and ingenuity of the women involved, but also to the hospitable environment of a small commercial city in the antebellum period. These women were still located in relatively close proximity to the centers of public power. Fanny Skinner was particularly well-situated in relation to the male leadership of the youthful city. The instigator of the male defense of Utica Female Moral Reform in 1837 was Cyrus Hawley, a clerk who happened to reside in the boarding house full of young lawyers which Skinner had managed for over a decade. But women's influence was not limited to such domestic associations. Most importantly, it extended to a rich social network based in the long-term, habitual cooperation of women in church and reform activities. The collective power of these groups, finally, was situated in easy reach of the arenas in which the male leaders of the city jostled for authority. In the 1830s and early 40s, the polity of Utica was still composed largely of innumerable associations of men. Informal networks not so different from the Utica Female Moral Reform Society, made decisions on everything from political candidates to the founding of factories. Accordingly, a well-organized

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM women's network, operating parallel to these male associations, had at least a fighting chance of affecting the policies and opinions of the community at large. These historical conditions, as well as the social form of the voluntary association, confused the boundaries between public and private life, thus allowing women to form circles of influence outside their homes and put ideological and moral pressure on the male authorities of the public sphere. In Oneida County in the 1830s and 40s as in similar cases described by anthropologists, this muting of the barrier between private and public life seems to have enhanced the power of women within their communities. 20 Neither these conditions nor the American Female Moral Reform Society would survive for very long. The last notice of an active local chapter of the Utica Society appeared in 1845, at about the same time that the city's first steam-powered cotton factory was put into operation, and just as the town was inundated with unskilled workers hailing from Ireland, Germany, and the British Isles. By mid-century, Utica had become a city of over twenty thousand inhabitants with a major industrial sector, and increasingly segregated pattern of residence. Once the old commercial community had become hopelessly fractured by ethnic and class differences, a band of Protestant women could no longer presume to make moral pronouncements for the city at large. Concomitantly, as Utica and Oneida County became more closely integrated into the national economic and political system, vital decisions were transferred from the neighborhood to a formidable city hall and then on to Washington and Wall Street, that is, to a remote, more formalized public sphere. The local conditions which allowed female moral reform to obtain this position of social power did not survive into a second generation. This is not to say that the movement ended with a quiet failure in the backwaters of social history. Such a thesis can be rebutted by several arguments. First of all, the members of the female moral reform societies of Oneida County were willing participants in the destruction of their own organization. In fact the disappearance of the society can be interpreted as a measure of successful sex reform. The Utica association disbanded in the midst of a quarrel over whether or not to hold a convention in nearby Clinton. Some of the members deemed it improper to conduct a public discussion of sexual matters in a town full of young seminary and college students. 21 It would seem that the Female Moral Reform Society had become caught up in its own propaganda, converted by its own increasingly exacting standard of propriety, which in the end prescribed almost complete reticence about sexual questions. Further-

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more, the sexual reform movement did not end even with the demise of the Society. The banners of purity which its members once hurled in the streets now paraded through popular culture. Wherever the young men and women of the 1850s might travel their path would be strewn with admonitions and expectations of sexual continence. The Advocate of Moral Reform itself survived the collapse of local chapters of the American Female Moral Reform Society and continued to propagate the ideology of sexual control. That ideology had become increasingly detached from organized women's networks. The Advocate of Moral Reform soon presumed an alternative social mechanism through which women could control sexual behavior, that is, through the private relationships of wives and especially mothers. The Advocate was happy to announce that moral reform now took place "where it should begin, in the right instruction of children." The journal's editors embraced the same doctrine of women's domestic influence celebrated in the ladies' magazines of the era: " A mother's love will accomplish more than anything else except omnipotence." 2 2 From the first, female moral reformers had placed special emphasis on maternity. In fact they were among the first and most forceful exponents of women's glorified role as the socializers of children. With the dissipation of local associations after 1845, women were left stranded in this isolated private sphere which the reformers themselves had done so much to cultivate. In the last analysis, Victorian women were guided into domestic confinement by members of their own sex. Such is the convoluted and ironic history of this example of the power of women's networks. This history can be instructive for contemporary feminists. It suggests, first of all, that women can find sources of organizational strength at the local level. The formal and national organizational structures which eluded the female moral reformers and which still have a fragile existence in today's women's movement can be strengthened and reinforced by connections with the everday associations and informal social networks of local and neighborhood women. In fact, such a bridge between local networks and national organization still exercises substantial social power. It is, however, the New Right which has proven particularly successful in utilizing such power, but for antifeminist purposes. Through neighborhood organization and affiliation with local and national churches, these women of the 1970s are conducting yet another campaign to control sexual mores: attacking homosexuality, fighting abortion and the ERA, and venerating the heterosexual nuclear family. Furthermore, like the moral reformers of the 1830s and 40s, the women

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

of the New Right have come to public prominence at a time of major social and sexual change, when for example, the rising divorce rate threatens to sever the ties between husbands and wives nearly as frequently as children were separated from parents by the frenetic geographical mobility of the nineteenth century. Now, as then, some women are reacting to this crisis by defending the domestic institutions which seem to offer them security along with inequality. The rise of the New Right, like the power of female moral reform may omen yet another readjustment of the sex/gender system with dubious consequences for women. In fact, it prompts some skepticism as to whether women's culture and female networks, which continue to be rooted largely in the relations of housewives and mothers, can generate much more than reflexive and defensive, rather than critical, responses to social and familial change. 2 3 It should be clear, at any rate, that not every incident and every species of women's social and historical power merits our applause. It is the use of that power which concerns feminists. In the case of female moral reform, the laudable ability to maneuver for social influence fell short of the feminist goal of subverting the restrictions and inequality delegated to women by the American sex/ gender system. The power of women's networks, be it manifest in female moral reform or the New Right, deserves more than either congratulations or condemnation. It requires serious, critical attention to both its historical permutations and diverted feminist possibilities.

NOTES I would like to thank Bert Hansen, the editois of Feminist Studies, and especially Judy Stacey for their help in revising this article. 1 These ideas were raised and debated at the session "The Legacy of Mary Ritter Beard," chaired by Ann J. Lane, at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke, Mass., August 1978. The concept of the sex/gender system is taken from Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex," Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 157-211. 2 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty and the Beast and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," American Quarterly 23 (October 1971): 562-84; Barbara J. Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 3 The exact population figures for Utica are as follows: 1820-2972; 1830-8323; 1840-12,782; 1850-17,565; 1860-22,529. The changing occupational structure of the city is represented in the following table:

44

HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Merchants Manufacturers 1828 1845 1855

11.1% 2.7% 2.9%

Professionals Shopkeepers 4.8% 10.2% 8.6%

12.5% 11.9% 6.6%

White Collar

Artisan

Unskilled/ Factory

4.8% 10.2% 8.6%

46.1% 45.4% 40.9%

14.1% 20.2% 24.1%

4 Whitney Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950); Mary P. Ryan, "A Women's Awakening: Revivalistic Religion in Utica, New York, 1800 to 1840," American Quarterly, forthcoming. 5 See McDowall's Journal, January, March, May, July and November, 1833, for correspondence from Utica. \ 6 Only thirty-four female moral reformers were identified by name, and only nineteen of these could be traced to the city directories. Of this latter group, six were married to merchants or shopkeepers, five to professionals, two to artisans: two were seamstresses and four had neither occupations nor employed husbands. Seven single women, as well as wives and widows were found in the same group. This range of class and marital status is the widest of any of the reform groups studied. 7 Daniel Scott Smith and Michael Hindus, "Premarital Pregnancy in America, 16401971: An Overview and Interpretation," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 5 (197475): 537-70. 8 "The Session Records of the First Presbyterian Church," First Presbyterian Church Utica, New York, Volume 3, December 3, 1834; December 17, 1834; January 2, 1835; Ju ly 2, 1835. 9 Advocate of Moral Reform, June 15, 1843; February 1, 1838; September 15, 1837. ^McDowall's Journal, November, 1833. 11 Samuel C. Aiken, "Moral Reform" (Utica: R. R. Shepard, 1834), pp. 8-9. 12 Information about Fanny Skinner is drawn from scattered references in local histories, church records, and reform society publications; for a biographical sketch of Paulina Wright see, Alice Felt Tyler, "Paulina Wright Davis," Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 1: 444-45. 13 McDo wall's Journal, June 1834; Advocate of Moral Reform, February 7, 1836; February 22, 1836. w Advocate of Moral Reform, September 15, 1842. 15 Ibid., July 1, 1842. 16 Ibid., December 15, 1841; April 1, 1844. 17 McDowall's Journal, June 1834; Advocate of Moral Reform, February 15, 1840; July 30, 1840. Oneida Whig, December 27, 1836; January 27, 1837; February 14, 1837. l9 The occupations and residences of the parties to the Moral Reform Controversy of 1836 and 1837 are summarized in the following table: Supporters of Female Moral Reform Opponents of Female Moral Reform Total Number Identified 118 50 Occupations Merchants/ Manufacturers 2% 22.9% Shopkeepers/ 4% Farmers 13.6% 12% 17.8% Professionals Clerks 9.3% 72% 36.4% Artisans 10%

SOCIAL A N D MORAL REFORM

Supporters of Female Moral Reform Opponents of Female Moral Reform Residence Home of Own Boards with Relatives or Employers Boards Alone

78.3%

11.8%

3.3% 18.6%

9.8% 78.4%

^Rayna Reiter, "Men and Women in the South of France, Public and Private Domains," Toward an Anthropology of Women, Rayna Reiter, ed., pp. 252-82; Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview," Woman, Culture and Society, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 17-42. 21 Advocate of Moral Reform, September 15, 1845. 22 Ibid., August 1838; August 1835. 23 The parallels between female moral reform and the New Right were brought to my attention during the discussion of this paper at the Women and Power Conference.

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H I S T O R Y O F W O M E N IN T H E U N I T E D S T A T E S

THE FORTEN-PURVIS WOMEN OF PHILADELPHIA AND THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY CRUSADE J a n i c e Sumler-Lewis* Nineteenth-century reform movements in the United States have received much scholarly attention. While historians have acknowledged the contributions of black men to the anti-slavery, temperance, civil rights, and women's rights crusades, they largely ignored the participation of black women. Except for a recent publication by historians Sharon Harley and RosalynTerborg-Penn.we possess little research on the black females who labored in the reform movements with their white counterparts, like Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. 1 We cannot hope to know the complete story of reform in this nation until the role of black women also comes to light. Investigations of antebellum era diaries, letters, organizational records, and periodicals reveal that many black women activists made a profound impact upon the struggles for liberty and for social justice in America. As black females in a racist-sexist society, they brought a unique perspective to their work. Because of a sharpened awareness and because of daily experiences in a biased America, black women activists guided female reform groups toward a more straightforward liberal posture. In this way, the combined activism and insightful perspective of black women reformers contributed importantly to the directions of change in the country. Such was the case with the Forten-Purvis women of nineteenth-century Philadelphia. In a generational study of this Afro-American family, I detailed how the affluent and cohesive domestic environment produced male abolitionists, like the family patriarch James Forten Sr., his two oldest sons, James Jr. and Robert, and his son-in-law Robert Purvis; the same environment afforded female family members an opportunity to oppose slavery. While the Forten and Purvis men labored besides such friends of emancipation as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, the FortenPurvis women brought a black female perspective to the reform movement in their native Philadelphia and the surrounding areas. 1 The extent and magnitude of their participation rivaled that of their more famous white female contemporaries. How did their involvement become possible? Transcending the traditional roles of wife and mother to enter the broader spheres of public life was an uncommon occurrence during the Victorian era. Scorn and even ostracism often greeted a woman who dared to venture outside what many considered to be her God-given realm. Beginning in the 1830s and 1840s, however, many women defied these social pressures, and they became both public and private individuals. 1 The Forten-Purvis women joined the ranks of this new breed of nineteenth-century

*Janice Sumler-Lewis is Visiting Professor of History at Spelman College. Atlanta. Georgia.

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

women. They successfully combined the role of reformer with the traditional responsibilities related to marriage and child rearing. James Forten Sr.'s outlook did much to determine the activist roles of his wife, daughters, and, later, his granddaughters. As a Revolutionary War veteran, a reformer, and a feminist, Forten had incorporated the American ideals of liberty and equality into his personal philosophy. T h o u g h he was a free black and a wealthy businessman, he sustained a keen racial consciousness as well as an empathy with the plight of his enslaved brethern and with that of all women. Moreover, Forten Sr. shared this enlightened philosophy with his son-in-law Robert Purvis who adopted it wholeheartedly. As a result, both the male members and the female members of the Forten and the Purvis households received an education and were encouraged to take an interest in public affairs. 4 A constant exposure to the reform careers of their parents facilitated the emergence of the Forten-Purvis women as activists. As the young people emulated these role models, humanitarianism became a family affair. During the antebellum era, James and Charlotte Forten accompanied their sons and daughters to numerous anti-slavery and moral reform meetings in and a r o u n d Philadelphia and even as far away as New York City. In subsequent years, the second generation Fortens and Forten son-in-law Robert Purvis also encouraged emancipation and civil rights activities in their respective offspring. 5 T h e Forten-Purvis women's reform involvement became extensive. Collectively, Mrs. Charlotte Forten, her three oldest daughters, and two granddaughters participated in numerous aspects of the e m a n c i p a t i o n crusade. M a j o r areas of their activities included: acting as hostesses for important antislavery gatherings, writing for reformist publications, and lobbying for the black abolitionist perspective in organizations with which they were affiliated. Gracious hospitality was a tradition in the Forten and Purvis households. During the second decade of the nineteenth-century, Harriet, Margaretta, and Sarah Forten were youngsters. They joined in greeting and conversing with Pan Africanist Paul Cuffe, Philadelphia ministers, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, and other prominent persons who frequented the Forten home. As the anti-slavery crusade gained m o m e n t u m during the 1830s, scores of reformers found support and a restful haven with the Fortens and with the newlyweds' Robert and Harriet Purvis. Their guests included Bostonians William Lloyd Garrison and Samuel May, British abolitionists George T h o m p s o n and Harriet M a r t i n e a u , New York businessmen A r t h u r and Lewis T a p p a n , and numerous others; indeed the Forten-Purvis family cultivated activist friendships.' T h e New England poet J o h n Greenleaf Whittier once became so enchanted with his F o r t e n hosts that he wrote a poem entitled, "To the Daughters of J a m e s Forten." Following a May 1832 visit to Philadelphia where he was the guest of Robert and Harriet Purvis, William Lloyd Garrison even felt it pertinent to extoll the moral character of his black hosts. Garrison described his visit in a letter to a friend. 1 w i s h y o u hard been with me in P h i l a d e l p h i a t o see w h a t I s a w , t o hear w h a t 1 heard, and to e x p e r i e n c e w h a t I felt in a s s o c i a t i n g w i t h m a n y c o l o r e d families. There are c o l o r e d men a n d w o m e n , y o u n g m e n a n d y o u n g ladies, in that city, w h o have few superiors in r e f i n e m e n t , in moral w o r t h , a n d in all that m a k e s the h u m a n character w o r t h y of a d m i r a t i o n a n d praise.

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

Such favorable associations offered the Forten-Purvis family members an opportunity to influence the thinking of their guests. For the white reformers, positive contacts with this black family gave them exposure to the black middle class while adding further proof of the acceptability of blacks in American life and the righteousness of the struggle to achieve human freedom. 7 Complementing their role as hostesses, the Forten-Purvis women carried their anti-slavery involvement outside the home; they entered the broader sphere of public life. They accomplished this through affiliations with various organizations. Four of the twenty-one women who met on the evening of December 9, 1833, at Catherine McDurmot's schoolroom to coordinate their abolitionist activities were Forten women. Mrs. Charlotte Forten, her three oldest daughters, and her prospective daughter-in-law Mary Woods all signed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society's charter, which daughter Margaretta Forten had helped to draft. These women declared their intent to use all the resources at their disposal toward removing the stain of slavery from the nation and elevating the status of black Americans. Recognizing Margaretta's leadership qualities, the members of the new Society elected her their recording secretary. In time, two Forten granddaughters, Charlotte L. Forten and her cousin Hattie Purvis, joined this group. Throughout the organization's forty years of emancipation and civil rights efforts, three generations of Forten-Purvis women remained active members and financial contributors.' The Forten-Purvis women's involvement in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society extended well beyond the life of their membership. Through key offices they held and through lobbying efforts, they influenced the group's activities and its philosophical direction. Working in conjunction with other black members, like Grace Douglass and her daughter Sarah, and with liberal whites, like Lucretia Mott, the Forten-Purvis women often enable this predominantly white organization to reflect a black abolitionist perspective, a perspective equally dedicated to the abolition of slavery and to the triumph of racial justice in America but a perspective usually more militant. Consequently, with the Forten-Purvis women's assistance, their female Society went far beyond reflecting the views of well-meaning ladies; it emerged as an aggressive, persistent force for change in the Philadelphia area. 9 An awareness of both the importance of educational opportunities for blacks and the problems resulting from a segregated school system were two areas towards which the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society reflected a black abolitionist perspective. Margaretta Forten, a teacher, served on her female Society's educational committee; it dedicated itself to improving the quantity and the quality of local black schools. In accordance with this objective, the committee quickly acted upon an 1838 request for financial assistance from their abolitionist colleague Sarah Douglass, the black coordinator of a Philadelphia primary school. Acknowledging Douglass' fine work, the Society voted to assume responsibility for the school's financial obligations. This arrangement lasted two years; the school then became self-sustaining. The Society's minutes reveal how the two Forten women played key roles in this instance. Sarah sat on the female Society's governing board of managers while, as a member of the educational committee, Margaretta supervised specific financial details. By their involvement, the two Forten sisters helped to serve the educational needs of Philadelphia's black community. 10

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM D u r i n g S a r a h Forten's three consecutive terms on the Philadelphia Female AntiS l a v e r y Society's b o a r d of m a n a g e r s , this governing body involved itself in many projects and m a d e important decisions, a great number reflected an aggressive abolitionist perspective. One such project was an extensive petition c a m p a i g n conducted in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties. S a r a h actively lead this endeavor. From 1835 to 1838, she assisted in drafting and circulating petitions which appealed to the United States C o n g r e s s to abolish the slave trade in the District of Columbia and to a b a n d o n further m o v e s toward a n n e x i n g T e x a s . A c c o r d i n g to the Society's minutes, S a r a h and other members of the petition committee gratefully acknowledged a March 9, 1837, letter f r o m Pennsylvania S e n a t o r S a m u e l M c K e a n ; he had delivered their list of signatures to his congressional c o l l e a g u e s . " Realizing the difficulty abolitionists often met in securing a meeting house, Sarah Forten, Lucretia M o t t , and six other members of their Society formed a special committee on December 8 , 1 8 3 6 . This committee launched a community-wide effort to sell shares in the cost of building Pennsylvania Hall, erected two years later on Delaware, S i x t h , a n d Haines Streets in P h i l a d e l p h i a . " While the Forten-Purvis women a n d other m e m b e r s of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society publicly professed their a d h e r e n c e to moral suasion as the only acceptable abolition tactic, these w o m e n frequently employed a more vigorous action a g a i n s t the peculiar institution. These apparently quiet, law-abiding, reserved women d o n a t e d hundreds of dollars to h a r b o r fugitives f r o m slavery. Between 1839 and 1842, a n effective partnership existed between this f e m a l e Society and the Philadelphia Vigilant Committee; it was one link in the fugitive assistance network under the leadership of Robert Purvis, Charles W. Gardiner, a n d other local blacks. The Philadelphia women responded generously to requests for aid from the Vigilant Committee. They answered a S I S request with a gift of SSO during J a n u a r y 1841. On that occasion their money relocated several fugitives in C a n a d a . T h e following winter when icy river conditions prevented travel north, the female Society's f u n d s boarded runaways in the city. T h e women collected garments for the often destitute bondsmen. For their efforts, they received frequent reports on the Vigilant C o m m i t t e e ' s progress.The Committee reported on J a n u a r y 9, 1842, that it had recently sent forty-six fugitives to C a n a d a . " It is not difficult to explain the Philadelphia F e m a l e Society's financial and philos o p h i c a l s u p p o r t f o r this predominantly black Vigilant Committee. First, Robert Purvis had proven his friendship to f e m a l e r e f o r m e r s . Beyond giving frequent and encouraging lectures at the women's meetings a n d b a z a a r s , he consistently defended their rights a s citizens a n d a s abolitionists. S e c o n d , because four members of the Forten-Purvis family were m e m b e r s a n d officers of the female Society. Vigilant C o m m i t t e e chairman R o b e r t Purvis had his own lobbying element within the organization. F o r e x a m p l e , Purvis' sister-in-law S a r a h F o r t e n sat on the board of managers which authorized the release of treasury f u n d s . A n o t h e r Purvis sister-in-law Margaretta Forten was selected to audit her Society's financial accounts of 1 8 4 0 . " T h e Philadelphia F e m a l e Anti-Slavery Society's m e m b e r s fully realized that financial aid to the Vigilant C o m m i t t e e a n d the implementation of an aggressive abolitionist perspective required a large treasury. Consequently, following the example of the B o s t o n F e m a l e Anti-Slavery Society, the Philadelphia women organized annual fundraising fairs and b a z a a r s . T h e Forten-Purvis w o m e n contributed considerable time

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

and talent toward this effort. From 1841 through 1869, the three sisters, Margaretta and Sarah and Harriet, worked diligently to make these annual events successful. Beginning in 1866 and for the next three years, Hattie Purvis, the teenage daughter of Robert and Harriet Purvis, also joined this effort. The labors of these Philadelphia women were rewarded; the fairs realized substantial profits. By one estimate between 1840 and the start of the Civil War, the Philadelphia Female Society raised over S32.000.'5 As the wife of prominent abolitionist Robert Purvis and the mother of their five children, Harriet Purvis maintained a busy schedule. Aside from her domestic responsibilities, her work with the annual bazaars, with acting as hostess for anti-slavery events, and with occasionally lecturing of the evils of racial segregation in the North, Harriet still found time to extend her abolitionist activities beyond the local Philadelphia area. Harriet and her sisters journeyed to New York in 1837; there, they attended the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women. Two years later, in an effort to curtail the profits resulting from slave labor, Harriet became a member of the regionally-based Free Produce Society. While visiting the New England area during May 18S4, Harriet accompanied her niece Charlotte Forten to a fugitive slave protest meeting." In all of her reform activities, Harriet Purvis received full support and encouragement from her husband. Robert Purvis did not stop with approving Harriet's activist role; he worked closely with his wife, so that the two formed an effective abolitionist team. During May 1840, the couple attended anti-slavery conventions, first, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and a week later in New York City. Harriet and Robert continued their reform efforts at the close of the Civil War. They joined the American Equal Rights Association and entered the struggle to enfranchise black men and all women. The Purvises' egalitarian marriage and activist partnership presented a unique phenomenon. Precious few such relationships existed during the Victorian era. Their marriage demonstrated one man's commitment to the concepts of equality and freedom of expression. Further, it revealed one woman's ability to transcend contemporary mores to share in both the private and public spheres of her husband's life and work.11 Beyond their organizational affiliations, the Forten-Purvis women's abolitionist spirit found expression in written form. The publication of their insightful poems, essays, and letters provided these black women with yet another opportunity to share their views with the American public. Beginning in 1831, Sarah Forten's poetry frequently appeared in the Liberator. Only seventeen years old at that time, this creative young woman condemned America's hypocritical commitment to liberty and equality. In "The Slave" Sarah urged Americans to remember their struggles for freedom against the British and to liberate the bondsmen. The same year, she denounced in an essay, "The Abuse of Liberty," the Northern practices of racial segregation and the denial of civil rights to blacks. Appealing to the professed religious nature of Americans, she reminded her readers that in time slavery would provoke God's wrath:

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

—I say, cry u n t o Him f o r aid; for can you think He, that Great Spirit, w h o created all men free and equal — H e , w h o , m a d e the sun t o shine o n the black m a n as well as o n the white, will always allow you t o rest tranquil o n y o u r d o w n y couches? No, — H e is j u s t , and his a n g e r will not always s l u m b e r . He will wipe the t e a r f r o m E t h i o p i a ' s eye; he will shake the tree of liberty, and its blossoms shall spread over the e a r t h . "

Through the years, Sarah Forten remained dedicated to poetic expression. As the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women assembled in New York City in 1837, Sarah wrote a poem for the gathering; it was read during the proceedings. Her verse poignantly articulated one black woman's desire to eliminate racial animosity and strife within abolitionist ranks. She also called for a bond of universal sisterhood and cooperation to transcend race." Like her aunt Sarah, Charlotte Forten, daughter of Robert and Mary Forten, showed poetic talent. While she was studying and later while she was teaching in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1850s, Charlotte's pieces appeared in the Liberator, in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and in Bishop Daniel Payne's Anglo African Magazine. Although this young scholar activist wrote verses on a variety of subjects, reform and racial pride were favorite themes. In 18SS, Charlotte demonstrated her respect for William Lloyd Garrison; she dedicated a poem to him. Three years later she wrote a song for the public commemoration of the Boston Massacre and the black hero Crispus Attucks. 20 Charlotte Forten's experience as a teenage abolitionist and as an author proved invaluable; in 1862 she traveled as a teacher to the Sea Islands of South Carolina. The Philadelphia Port Royal Relief Commission selected Charlotte, who was then twentyfive, to be one of the first Northern blacks involved with the experimental reconstruction project. Charlotte also represented her activist family in the final phase of the emancipation struggle. 21 Besides serving as teacher for the native black population, Charlotte assumed the role of propagandist for the reconstruction plan. Like many Sea Island volunteers, Charlotte believed that the former bondsman could bridge the gap from slave to productive citizen. A very skeptical and largely racist American public remained unconvinced of this fact, however. Charlotte accepted the challenge. Through her letters and articles published in the Liberator and in the Atlantic Monthly, she described the rapid gains and accomplishments of the Sea Island residents. Because of her insight, her empathetic nature, and her eagerness to help her race, Charlotte Forten brought a unique perspective to the Port Royal project. Several of her colleagues acknowledged this. Among them was Laura Towne, a white teacher from Philadelphia, who praised the accuracy and the sensitivity of Charlotte's account of their Sea Island labors. In a journal entry Towne wrote, "Lottie Forten's article in the Atlantic, sent [to] me by Mr. Pierce is very good indeed. They are her letters to Whittier revised and tell more of our life than anything yet published." 32 After the two years at Port Royal and after the conclusion of Civil War hostilities, Charlotte accepted a position as secretary of the Freedmen's Aid Society in Boston. Part of her assignment was to select teachers and missionaries for work among the Southern blacks. On June 8, 1867, recalling her work on the Sea Islands, Charlotte encouraged Lucy Chase, a freedmen's teacher. While she recognized the many selfsacrificing efforts and the disappointments that Chase encountered, she assured her

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HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES

friend that the rewards of her work would far outweigh the problems. Charlotte could suggest no nobler work than dedicating one's life to "the regeneration of a down trodden and long suffering people."" With those words, Charlotte Forten expressed the philosophy which had sustained her family's nearly century-long commitment to reform in America. Working for three generations with their men, the Forten-Puryis women brought a unique black female perspective and spirit to the crusades for freedom and for equality of opportunity. The legacy of their contributions offers inspiration to those who would follow their footsteps.

' Sharon Harley and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn. eds.. The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images (Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1978). The following only briefly mention the black female reformer: Benjamin Quarks. Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press. 1969); Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease. They Who Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, I8J0-IS6I (New York: Atheneum. 1974); Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978). 'Janice Sumler Lewis, "The Fortens of Philadelphia: An Afro-American Family and NineteenthCentury Reform* (Unpublished dissertation, Georgetown University. 1978): "Constitution of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 14 December 1833. Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 'Hersh. The Slavery of Sex. pp. 1-4. 18-21; Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond.eds., Lettersof Theodore D. Weld and Angelina Grimke Weld and Sarah Grimke (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934), p. 472. 4 Robert Purvis, Remarks on the Life and Character of James Forten Delivered at Bethel Church on March JO. 1842 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson. 1842). pp. 16. 17. '"Minutes of the Phildelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society " 9 December 1833,14 December 1833, HSP; Proceedings of the American Moral Reform Society Held at Philadelphia in the Presbyterian Church on Seventh Street Below Shippenfrom the 14th to the 19th of August ISJ7 (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Funn, 1837); Proceedings of the Third Annual Meeting of the American Ami-Slavery Society in ISJ6 (New York: W.S. Dorr, 1836). See the following entries in the "Charlotte Forten Dairy," 1, Howard University Manuscripts. 27 May 1854, 1 June 1854. 29 October I8S4. 19 August I8S5. and 4 July 1856. 'See the following letters contained in the Paul Cuffe Collection, Free Public Library, New Bedford, Massachusetts: Paul Cuffe to James Forten, 29 May 1816, Paul Cuffe to James Fonen. 18 January 1817, James Forten to Paul Cuffe. 25 July 1816."Paul Cuffe Journal."entriesfor 11 May I8l2and 12 May 1812. From 1806 through I860, the Fortens lived at 92 Lombard Street. See the Philadelphia Directory. Barnes and Dumond. Weld-Grimke Letters, p. 351; James Forten to William Lloyd Garrison, 30 December 1830 and 6 May 1832, both contained in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. Boston Public Library; Lewis Tappan, The Life of Arthur Tappan (Cambridge; Hurdand Houghton. Riverside Press. 1870), p. 360; Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Anti-Slavery Conßict (Boston: Fields. Osgood and Co.. 1869), pp. 81-88. 'Garrison's letter describing his Philadelphia visit contained in Archibald H. Grimke. William Lloyd Garrison. The Abolitionist (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1891). p. 162; William Lloyd Garrison to Robert Purvis. 30 May 1832, BPL; Whittier's poem contained in Anna Julia Cooper. The Life and Writing of the Grimke Family. II (Washington. D.C., 1951). p. 13. '"Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society." 9 December 1833, 14 December 1833.13 December 1866,11 June 1868. and 21 March 1870. HSP: Esther M. Douly. Charlotte Forten. Free Black Teacher (Champaign: Garrard Publishers, 1971), pp. 31-33. ' Besides Grace and Sarah M. Douglass, other black women who joined the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society included: Sarah McCrummel, Mary Woods, Anna Woods, Debrah Coates, Hannah Coates, and Amy Matalida Cassey. See Quarles, Black Abolitionists, pp. 225, 230-231, 234-235. 10 Margaretta Forten was listed as a private grammar school teacher in Benjamin C. Bacon, Statistics of the Colored People of Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Published by order of the Pennsylvania Society for

SOCIAL AND MORAL REFORM

Promoting the Abolition of Slavery's board of education, 1859), p. 8. For information concerning the Philadelphia Female Society and the Sarah Douglass school, see: "Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 8 March 1838 and 9 April 1840. ""Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 10 June 1835.13 September 1835.9 March 1837, 18 May 1837, and 10 August 1837. ""Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery," HSP, for the following dates: 8 December 1834,10 December 1835, 14 May 1835. 13 June 1835, 8 December 1836, 12 January 1837, and 18 May 1837. For information on the burning of Pennsylvania Hall see The History of Pennsylvania Hall Which Was Destroyed by a Mob on the 17 of May ISJS (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Gunn, 1838). ""Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 13 January 1841, 10 February 1842, 10 March 1842,13 April 1842,9 January 1842, HSP. See also the "Vigilant Committee of Philadelphia Minute Book 1839-1844," HSP. 14 Richard C. Smedley, History of the Underground Railroad in Chester and the Neighboring Counties of Pennsylvania (Lancaster: The office of the Journal, 1883, reprint edition. New York: Negro University Press, 1968), "Minutes of the Phildelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 9 January 1840; Quarles Black Abolitionists, pp. 154-155, 158. "Occasionally the Forten-Purvis women chaired the fair committees. See "Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 4 February 1856 and 10 February 1859. Young Hattie Purvis joined the Society on 8 February 1866, and she worked with the fair committees through 1868. ""Minutes of the Phildelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society," 12 April 1838, 10 October 1839, and 13 September 1866; Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Heldin New York City (New York: W.S. Dorr, 1837); "Charlotte Forten Diary." I, 27 May 1854. ""Minutes of the Pennsylvania State Anti-Slavery Society," 6 May 1840 and 7 May 1840, HSP: "Broadside of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society's Festival of Friends," 17 January 1867, HSP; National Anti-Slavery Standard, I June 1867; Ida Η usted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1898; reprint ed., New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969), pp. 259-260. " In a letter to Garrison, James Forten Sr. identified the pieces in the Liberator under the pen names of "A" and "Ada" as the work of his daughter Sarah. See James Forten Sr. to William Lloyd Garrison, 23 February 1831, BPL. Sarah also used the pen name "Magawisca." For examples of Sarah's poetry and articles see the following iuues of the Liberator: 29 January 1831, 26 March 1831, and 16 April 1831. " Barnes and Dumond, Weld-Grimke Letters, pp. 381,382; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, p. 27; Edward T. James. Notable American Women. 1607-1950 (Cambridge: Belknpa Press, 1971). p. 194. 10 Annual Report for the School Committee of Salem, Massachusetts (Salem: February 1854), pp. 29-30; "Charlotte Forten Diary," I, 10 August 1854, 31 December 1854, 13 March 1855, and 18 June 1856; "Charlotte Forten Diary." Ill, 18 June 1858and 26 July 1858; Liberator: 16 March 1855.27 May 1857,and 26 February 1858. A copy of Charlotte's song has not survived, but Benjamin Quarles refers to it in Black Abolitionists, p. 233. 11 Charlotte arrived at Hilton Head, South Carolina, on 28 October 1862. See "Charlotte Forten Diary," III, 27 October 1862, written at sea, and 29 October 1862. " " L a u r a Towoe Diary,"4 November 1862 and 18 May 1864, James Dabbs Papers. Southern Historical Collection. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill: Liberator, 19 December 1862; Charlotte Forten. "Life on the Sea Islands", Atlantic Monthly 13 (May and June 1864). "Charlotte Forten to Lucy Chase, 8 June 1867, American Antiquarian Society Manuscripts, Boston, Massachusetts.

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RACE, SEX, AND THE DIMENSIONS OF LIBERTY IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA Jean Matthews The world has never had a good definition of the word 'liberty,' " wrote Abraham Lincoln in 1864, "and the American people . . . are much in the want of one." In antebellum America the continued prominence of revolutionary traditions together with the existence of slavery made it tempting to celebrate liberty rather than probe deeply into its meaning. Yet the meaning of liberty was being explored, deepened, and extended in this period as new groups laid claim to inclusion in the republican heritage. Two kinds of people in particular had reason to grapple with the nature of liberty: free blacks and white women. As Jane and William Pease have pointed out, free blacks knew from often bitter experience that freedom was not synonymous with the legal status of freedman. From the 1830s onwards spokesman for free blacks in the northern states were giving formal articulation to ideas about what freedom must mean for them, through state and national conventions, through a black press, and through individual polemical writings. Similarly, some of the women attached to the abolition movement began to apply antislavery ideas to themselves, scattered groups petitioned for property and political rights, and from 1848 onwards women's rights conventions met to become the focus for a fledgling feminist movement.1

Ms. Matthews is a member of the Department of History at the University of Western Ontario in London. This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the SHEAR conference in Indianapolis in July 1984 and at a meeting of the Pacific Coast branch of the AHA at Stanford in J u n e 1985. 1 Quoted in John P. Diggins, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue, Self-Interest, and the Foundations oj Liberalism (New York 1984), 313; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search Jor Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York 1974), 3-5. For the free black demands for equal rights and the black convention

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The connection between the two movements lies in a certain overlap of personnel as well as in the structural similarities of racism and sexism. Not all feminists were immune from racism, not all black males avoided sexual chauvinism, but a significant number of male feminists were black men and the majority of antebellum women feminists had connections and sympathies with the abolition movement. Though the voices to be discussed here are primarily those of black men and white women, black women were involved in movements for the freedom of their sex as well as for the freedom of their race. It is not necessary to claim that the frustrations felt by white women were in any sense equivalent to the oppression faced by free blacks of both sexes, to note that it was quite natural for participants in both movements and for hostile white men to see certain similarities in their situations. " H o w did woman first become subject to man as she now is all over the world?" demanded the New York Herald in 1852. "By her nature, her sex, just as the negro is and always will be, to the end of time, inferior to the white race, and, therefore, doomed to subjection." There were, of course, many ways in which blacks were deprived of freedom which had no real analogies in the experience of white women. Further, the whole problem of injecting the concept of freedom into the sphere of family relations was a question crucial to women but hardly perceived by black men. However, there were certain things that both groups conceived as vital components of freedom, even if not always in exactly the same ways. 2 To concentrate on the published words of self-defined radicals means dealing with a few prominent and articulate leaders with a very shadowy

movement tee, besides Pease and Pease, Leon F. Litwack, North oj Slavery: The Negro in the Fret Staitz, 1790-1860 (Chicago 1961), and Leonard P. Curry, The Fret Black in Urban Amenta, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago 1981), esp. chs. 12 and 13. For antebellum feminist organizations see Eleanor Flexner, Century ojStruggle: The Woman's Rights Movement in the United States (rev. ed., Cambridge, Mass. 1975), Ellen C. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence oj an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca 1978), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton et al., History oj Woman Suffrage (6 vols., New York and Rochester 1881-1922). The use of the term "feminist" is anachronistic for this period, yet it is the most convenient shorthand to designate demands for equality and individual self-expansion, which was one, and arguably the most important one, of the streams that fed into what later became known as the feminist movement. 1 Quoted in Stanton et al., History oj Woman Suffrage, I, 854. Such prominent free blacks as Charles Remond, James Forten, and Robert Purvis were all supporters of women's rights, but the most important was Frederick Douglass. Sec Philip S. Foner, ed., Frederick Douglass on Women's Rights (Westport, Conn. 1976), and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind oj Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill 1984), ch. 6.

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following. No doubt there were many unknown blacks and white women who read the reports of these conventions and other polemics in silent assent, but it was very difficult actually to mobilize large numbers of either blacks or women behind the rallying cries of liberty and equality. Few things infuriated feminists quite as much as the numerous women who blithely asserted that they had "all the rights they want," and who were often uncomprehending or hostile at any attempt to translate female concerns into the masculine political language of "rights." Frederick Douglass complained bitterly that a national convention of blacks to assert their rights might draw fifty people, while a black Masonic or Odd-fellows celebration could bring out from four to five thousand at a cost that would have supported several newspapers. 1 Why was it so hard for these often highly talented and dynamic individuals to transfer their own passionate concern with liberty to a mass following? Isaiah Berlin has pointed out that "the lack of freedom about which men or groups complain amounts, as often as not, to the lack of proper recognition." And, he added, "the only persons who can so recognize me, and thereby give me the sense of being someone, are the members of the society to which, historically, morally, economically, and perhaps ethnically, I feel that I belong." A key phrase here is "feel that I belong"; the community to which in some objective sense one belongs, or to which one is assigned by others, may not necessarily be the group with which the individual identifies himself and from which he seeks recognition. American culture increasingly consigned all blacks to the community of an inferior and proscribed caste, and all women to a separate sphere which was at the same time flattered and divorced from public power. Through custom and public opinion as much as law, it operated very powerfully to prevent any black from ever being net a black or any woman not a woman. 4 Women, at least, could find certain compensations in this. Nineteenth century American culture offered women a range of identities, all with a certain status, which were clearly more enticing and satisfy1 Stanton Λ al., History of Wörnern Suffragt, I, 184; Frederick Douglas« in the North Star, July 14, 1846, quoted in Howard Brote, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920 (New York 1966), 204. The feminist and temperance advocate, Clarina H. NichoU, recalled that on speaking tour· the could often disarm audiences hostile to the idea of woman's rights by smuggling them into the context of woman's "wrongs." Stanton Λ al., History of Woman Suffrage, I, 184. 4 Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford, Eng. 1969), 155-156.

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ing to most women, as well as less risky, than that of equal citizen: the "Republican Mother," for example, or the " l a d y . " Moreover, the various levels of "women's culture," which historians have begun to explore so fully, from communities of female kin to various kinds of benevolent and moral reform associations, probably provided a quite satisfactory recognition, by other women, of talents and status. American culture as a whole did not offer similar prestigious identities to free blacks, but the community itself developed hierarchies and organizations that offered status and recognition by other blacks. While in both cases these developments enhanced self-respect and sometimes offered the opportunity to develop organizational skills, they probably served to deflect their participants from examining their situation in terms of the central American language of liberty and equality. 3 The antebellum feminists and the black leaders who boldly organized to demand full civil rights, including the franchise, were those who for one reason or another—education, class, personal experience, or personality—had dislocated themselves psychologically from what others considered their "natural" community of race or sex, and instead sought recognition from and status within the world of white males. This is not to say that they were deferential towards contemporary white men—quite the reverse—but that their reference point was western civilization; their standard of achievement was the highest standard held up to white males. Their exclusion from participating fully in this culture, the disabilities that prevented them from achieving in its terms, was felt acutely and personally as deprivation of freedom and as humiliation. Elizabeth Cady Stanton singled out the experience of humiliation as crucial to the experience of both free blacks and women. She pointed to Robert Purvis, a Philadelphia black man who, wealthy and cultivated, was yet "denied all social communion with his neighbors, equal freedom and opportunity for himself and children, in public amusements, churches, schools, and means of travel because of race." A poor white man, she imagined, might think to himself: "If I were Robert Purvis,

5

For the development of black organization*, see Litwack, North oj Slavery, and Curry, The Free Black in Urban America. On the separation of black leaden from the mass of the black community, see Pease and Pease, They Who Would Be Free, 289-293. On women's culture, communities, and organizations, see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds oj Womanhood: "Woman 's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven 1977); Mary I*. Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America," Feminist Studies, 5 (Spring 1979), 66-85; and Carroll SmithRosenberg, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975), 1-29.

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with a good bank account, and could live in my own house, ride in my own carriage, and have my children well fed and clothed, I should not care if we were all as black as the ace of spades." But, she added, that man had never experienced the "humiliation of color." Simiarly, men could not appreciate the subtle humiliations of women possessed of wealth, education, and genius . . . sind yet can any misery be more real than invidious distinctions on the ground of sex in the laws and constitution, in the political, religious, and moral position of those who in nature stand the peers of each other? And not only do such women suffer these ever-recurring indignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.' In both her examples it is the exceptional person, in terms of wealth, talent, and cultural background, who feels the sting of discrimination because it is felt to be more unnatural and therefore more unjust than the injuries of class. The disabilities of early nineteenth century women and free blacks were felt most acutely by those who knew themselves capable of doing and achieving things which the laws or prejudices, or even the internalized prohibitions, of American society prevented them from doing, or which restrained them from enjoying the influence, status, or comforts to which their talents or wealth entitled them. Caste operated unnaturally to deflect the " n o r m a l " operations of class, the accepted sifting mechanisms of free society. Color, complained Charles Remond, protesting the segregated cars on Massachusetts railroads, had the effect of wiping out all distinctions among blacks: " I t is said we all look alike. If this is true, it is not true that we all behave alike. There is a marked difference; and we claim a recognition of this difference." 7 If we accept Stanton's focus on humiliation as central to the subjective experience of these black and feminist leaders, then it is not surprising that they should have conceived of liberty primarily in individualistic terms: as equal access to all aspects of American life and as the career open to talents. It was one of the principal sins of man, according to the Seneca Falls Declaration of 1848, that he had closed against woman "all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he

' Stanton et «/., History of Woman Suffragt, II, 266. ' Charles Lenox Remond, Address to a Massachusetts Legislative Committee, 1842, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Voice of Black America: Major Speeches by Negroes in Uu United Staus, 1797-1971 (New York 1972), 73.

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considers most honorable to himself.'' The black doctor, John Rock, lamented, "there is no field" for the young black man of talent. "You can hardly imagine," he continued, "the humiliation and contempt a colored lad must feel by graduating first in his class and then being rejected everywhere else because of his color."· To note their individualism is to acknowledge that these psychologically marginal people were in the intellectual mainstream of American, and indeed nineteenth century western, culture. Historians interested in the development of American individualism have seldom noticed the extent to which both feminist and black claims were part of that swelling tide of individual self-assertion and the separation of self out of the group. Eric Foner has suggested that "only a movement that viewed society as a collection of individuals . . . that believed every individual had the right to seek advancement as a unit in a competitive society" could condemn slavery as completely as the abolitionists did. One might add that it took men and women who had a burning awareness of themselves as individuals unjusdy cramped, thwarted, and humiliated because of their membership in a subordinate group to demand that the logic of liberal individualism be applied without consideration of race or sex. 9 To do so implied that the individual could, in a sense, be abstracted from the accidents of race and sex and be seen as essentially the freehold owner and user of energies and talents. Feminists in particular were drawn to the Romantic versions of individualism which conceived of the individual less as a finished unit than as a bundle of potentialities which required freedom as their essential medium of growth. T o deprive the individual of the necessary scope for development was thus the ultimate injustice because it violated the essence of human nature. "The fundamental principle of the Woman's Rights movement," resolved a convention of 1853, "is . . . that every human being, without distinction of sex, has an inviolable right to the full development and

* "Declaration of Sentiments," Seneca Falls, 1848, in Stanton et al., History oj Woman Suffrage, I, 71; John S. Rock, 1862, in Foner, ed., Voice oj Mack America, 258. 9 Eric Foner, "The Causes of the American Civil War: Recent Interpretations and New Directions," in Polities and Ideology in Uu Age of the Civil War (New York 1980), 23-24. For the individualism of most feminist thinkers see James L. Cooper and Sheila M. Cooper, eds., The Roots oj American Feminist Thought (Boston 1973), introduction; for a critique of that individualism, see Elizabeth H. Wolgast, Equality and the Rights oj Women (Ithaca 1980). A recent brief essay on American individualism is J. R. Pole, American Individualism and the Promise oj Progress (Oxford, Eng. 1980). The romantic individualism of personal growth is discussed in Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Mass. 1964), cap. ch. 12.

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free exercise of all energies." Women are human, exclaimed the editor of the feminist paper, The Una, " a n d must have the freedom which an unlimited development demands." 1 0 I f white women tended to put rather more emphasis on freedom as the medium for individual growth, rather than the access to the economic opportunities and rewards of American life which preoccupied black men, it was partly because they could afford such a luxury. But it was also because freedom for women entailed a domestic dimension absent from the struggles of black men—it meant disentangling oneself from the mesh of domestic relations, being ready to refuse, or at least deal coolly with, the "family c l a i m . " " A woman is nobody. A wife is everything," declared a Philadelphia newspaper, horrified at the goings-on at Seneca Falls. That was the problem. The prevailing ideology of true womanhood made self-sacrifice the most womanly of virtues; it was the suppression of her own self in the home which allowed it to be a nurturing place for male selves. Elizabeth Stanton thought that the moral freight attached to female self-sacrifice was one of the hardest things for women to bring themselves to repudiate. " P u t it down in capital letters," she told a reporter in later years, " S E L F D E V E L O P M E N T IS A H I G H E R D U T Y T H A N S E L F S A C R I F I C E . " The yearning for self-development and the doubt that it could be accomplished in the feminine sphere of home was one of the things which drew middle class women to the idea of work. They saw work outside the home as providing a field in which women could realize those latent selves stifled at the domestic hearth. Nothing could supply the place of work to a woman, said the first American woman doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell: " I n all human relations, the woman has to yield, to modify her individuality . . . but true work is perfect freedom, and full satisfaction.""

10 Stanton et al., History oj Woman Suffrage, I, 855; Paulina Wright Davis, The Una, 1 (June 1853), 73. For the idea of "possessive individualism" and its more dynamic nineteenth century developments, see C. B. Macpherson, Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford, Eng. 1973), 199, 32. " Philadelphia Public Ledger and Daily Transcript, quoted in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, I, 804. Stanton is quoted in Judith Nies, Seven Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition (New York 1977), 67, and Blackwdl in Let· Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generation oj 1780-1840 (New Haven 1984), 66. Access to greater educational opportunities was an important goal for both feminists and free blacks since education seemed the key to achieving both individual advancement and individual development. It gave the mean· to develop and extend talents, to move up in the world, and to throw off the shackles of felt inferiority to well educated white men.

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Work offered more than self-development, however; it offered independence. Conceiving of freedom in individualist terms led both feminists and black leaders into an instinctive adherence to the traditional republican horror of dependence. Dependence was degrading and essentially antithetical to liberty. But blacks and feminists interpreted what dependence meant in different ways. T o the middle class feminist it meant the inability to be economically self-supporting. The paucity of careers open to women hardly enabled them to live decently without being forced to marry for a home or live uneasily in the home of parents or married siblings. Dependence meant financial dependence on a husband. Feminists took as a particular target the common law rules on the property of married women which reduced the wife, in the words of one female petition, to " a mere pensioner on the bounty of her husband." In a culture that elevated the moral value of work, in which even upper class males continually emphasized the amount of hard work they did, the sensitive woman in a well-to-do household could easily come to feel herself a parasite, enjoying a standard of comfort which she had not " e a r n e d . " Perhaps most important, feminists came to interpret the status of being " k e p t " as entailing the same kind of degradation of character which traditional republican theory bestowed upon the dependent male: dependents became servile and underhanded because they had to please a master. " 'Rule by obedience and by submission sway,' or in other words study to be a hypocrite," wrote the abolitionist Sarah Grimk£ contemptuously, "pretend to submit, but gain your point"; that "has been the code of household morality which woman has been taught." 1 2 Because of their lack of control over economic resources feminists could see all women as in a sense " p o o r " and degraded, not so much by material hardship, but by the lack of independence and thus selfrespect that poverty entailed. There were many women, of course, as feminists recognized, who were literally poor and who did not have the choice of dependence, who had to earn their own living and often that of their children. And few of them earned wages sufficient to provide a decently independent life. Feminists interpreted the problem of the working woman, not in terms of the economic system, but of

" "Memorial to the [state] Constitutional Convention adopted by Woman's Rights Convention, Salem, O h i o " (1850), in Gerda Lerner, ed., The Female Experience (Indianapolis 1977), 344. Sarah Grimkc, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and the Condition oj Woman (1838; rep. New York 1970), 17. For the republican horror of dependence see, for example, Jack P. Greene, All Men Are Created Equal: Some Reflections on the Character of the American Revolution (Oxford, Eng. 1976), 20-21.

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the pernicious workings of caste. Male prejudice restricted the number of jobs open to women; women's own internalization of male opinion of their capacities, social conventions of propriety, and the torpor induced by subordination meant that few took the time and trouble to acquire marketable skills. " I know girls who have mechanical genius sufficient to become Arkwrights and Fultons," said one speaker at a woman's rights convention, " b u t their mothers would not apprentice them. Which of the women at this Convention have sent their daughters as apprentices to a watchmaker?" T h e result was that women were crowded into a very few lines of work and so continually drove down each other's wages. The feminist solution for both lady and mill girl was wider economic opportunities and the will to use them. "Poverty is essentially slavery," wrote Paulina Davis in The Um, "if not legal, yet actual." Women must understand this and "they must go to work": They must press into every avenue, every open door, that custom and the law leave unguarded, aye, and themselves withdraw the bolts and bars from others still closed against them . . . . They must purchase themselves out of bondage . . . . For as long as the world stands, its government will go with its cares, services and responsibilities. Children and women, till they can keep themselves, will be kept in pupilage by the same power which supports them. 15 Several historians have pointed out that abolitionists had no sympathy with the concept of "wage slavery" and refused to see any analogy between the working class in the developing capitalist economy and the slave on the plantation. For feminists too, "wage slavery" might metaphorically describe wretchedly low wages, but not the structure of the employment relationship itself. M e n of the revolutionary generation had considered wage-earning, as opposed to freehold farming or self-employment, as a form of dependence, and many American workingmen were still clinging to that conception. But to feminists, for women to be paid a specific cash wage, in return for specific work

15 J . Elizabeth J o n e s at the Syracuse National W o m a n ' s Rights Convention of 1852, quoted in Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, I, 530; Paulina Wright Davis, The Una, 1 (Sept. 1853), 138. J o n e s m a d e her own living as a lecturer on science and insisted that it was within women's own power to apprentice themselves to skilled trades. " T h e r e is n o law against (his!" Luc ret ia M o t t replied, " T h e C h u r c h a n d public opinion are stronger than l a w , " and Lucy Stone pointed out that when some women in Massachusetts had apprenticed themselves as printers, they " w e r e expelled because m e n would not set type beside t h e m . ' ' Stanton et al., History of Woman Suffrage, I, 530-531.

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outside the home, was a step upwards and onwards from the multiple dependencies of woman's traditional domestic sphere. The impersonal capitalist marketplace, however harsh, offered an escape from the more galling personal dependence on particular men. 14 Like women, free black men, when employed at all, were crowded into a very few occupations, most of which were not only low paid but of litde prestige in the wider culture. In many ways they shared with women the task of "servicing" white males. Black spokesmen like Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany denounced black men for their "dependency," by which they meant this employment in "servile" tasks. Black men were barbers, shoe blacks, and porters, and their women were domestic servants and washerwomen—servicing whites rather than their own families. This denunciation immediately got Douglass and Delany into hot water with many people in the black community and they had to back off somewhat and protest that they accepted any useful and honest labor as worthy of respect. But they would not give way too far: the association of blacks with " m e n i a l " work only served to depress the estimation in which the community was held by the larger society. H e knew, wrote Delany, that he would offend many blacks by suggesting that to be a servant was degrading: " I t is not necessarily degrading; it would not be, to one or a few people of a kind; but a whole race of servants are a degradation to that people." Both urged blacks to abandon the servicing of whites and instead take up land and become farmers and apprentice their children to the skilled trades. These were ideal "republican" occupations in which a man was self-employed and independent. O n e of the attractions of farming, in particular, was that not only did it seem a traditional road to economic independence but, according to one committee report in the black national convention of 1843, it bestowed respectability and " c h a r a c t e r " and puts the one farmer, be he whom he may, upon the same level with his neighbors . . . ; his neighbors see him now, not as in other situations they may have done as a servant; but as an independent man; . . . farmers, they respect their own calling, feel themselves independent— they must and will respect his, and feel that he is alike independent. 14 For wage earning as dependency and "slavery" see, for example, Foner, Politics and Ideology tn the Age of the Civil War, 60; for the abolitionist attitude, «ee ibid., 71, and Jonathan A. Glickstein, " 'Poverty is not Slavery': American Abolitionists and the Competitive Labor Market," in Antiskueiy Reconsidered, ed. Lewis Perry and Michael Fcllman (Baton Rouge 1979), 193-218. 'ITu Una devoted a good deal of «pace to the problem of women's employment and obviously struck a chord with its readers since there were several readers' letters on the subject.

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Frederick Douglass put particular faith in the crafts. He urged blacks to get their sons apprenticed in the "blacksmith's shop, the machine shop, the joiner's shop, the wheelwright's shop . . . , " although he acknowledged elsewhere that white prejudice seemed most solidly entrenched among the craftsmen of the skilled trades and that it was almost impossible to persuade a white craftsman to take a non-white apprentice. Yet the glamour of the independent craftsman in his own shop, though it might be economically obsolescent, was his status as an independent republican citizen.11 In asserting the necessity of being independent, blacks and feminists were linking themselves to an established republican tradition, one of the most strongly held values of Jacksonian America. But for them to appropriate this value as a right for themselves was to court considerable risk. Tolerated in menial positions, blacks invoked the fury of whites when they competed with white workers or asserted a claim to equal rights and dignity. Even well disposed whites preferred blacks as objects of benevolence rather than as equal citizens. Though women were not the targets of mob violence like blacks, their assertion of independence was also dangerous, since to most Americans there was an implicit equation of dependence with femininity. As many commentators on womanhood asserted, it was women's dependence which

" Martin Robison Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, end Destiny oj the Colored PtopU oj At United States (1852, rep. New York 1969), esp. 42-43, 200 (quotation); Report of the Committee upon Agriculture, "Minutes of the National Convention of Colored Citizen·: Held at Buffalo . . . 1843," 32, in Minutes oj the Proceedings oj the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864, ed. Howard Holman Bell (New York 1969); Frederick Douglas·, "An Address to the Colored People of the United Slates," Sept. 29, 1848, in Brotz, cd., Negro Social and Political Thought, 211. See als» the "Resolves of the National Colored Convention, Cleveland, 1848," 13, in Bell, ed., Proceedings oj the National Negro Conventions. These views on "servile" occupations obviously had a constituency outside the leadership of the conventions and men like Douglass and Delany. A black in California wrote to the press making the same point. Urging every black to abandon such positions as "boot-blacks, waiters, servants and carriers," he added: "I do not wish to be understood as despising any of the callings I have mentioned above, [but] . . . so long as we follow such pursuits, so long will we be despised. The world may preach the dignity of labor . . . . But however pretty this may be in theory, everyone is aware that it does not exist in reality. The man is judged and courted, not for his inherent qualities, but for his position and wealth." San Francisco Minor oj the Times, in Martin E. Dann, ed., The Black Press, 1827-1890: The Quest jor National Identity (New York 1971), 334. For some of the acrimony over the contemptuous expressions employed by some leaders about service job·, see "Resolves of the National Colored Convention, Cleveland," 5-6, and Howard Holman Bell, A Survey ojthe Negro Convention Movement, 1830-1861 (1953, rep. New York 1969), 102-104.

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made men love them, so that to repudiate dependence was to risk not only being unloved but also male retaliation. In several antifeminist polemics there is an only party veiled assumption that the natural attitude of men towards women is antagonism. Women could deflect this antagonism by deferential and dependent behavior, but if they abandoned that behavior men would turn upon them with the full force of untrammeled aggression and competitiveness. "All the sacred protection of religion, all the generous promptings of chivalry, all the poetry of romantic gallantry, depend upon woman's retaining her place as dependent and defenceless," warned Catherine Beecher. The clergy were particularly quick to warn women that when they assumed "the place and tone of a m a n " then "we put ourselves in self-defence against her"; if, in a favorite metaphor, the vine sought to emulate the independence of the oak, in the resulting disorganization of society, the vine would be "the first to fall and be trodden under foot." 1 6 Their emphasis on individual effort, "elevation," and selfdevelopment made the relationship of these black and feminist leaders with the black community and with "womanhood" as a whole deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, feminists and black leaders dissociated themselves from many aspects of the culture of " t h e i r " group; yet on the other, their identification with it was so deep that any injury or insult to any black or any woman evoked not merely sympathy, but was felt as a personal insult. Further, the attainment of personal freedom for individual members of an identifiable group of inferior status could not in fact be achieved without the elimination of the legal disabilities and the wall of prejudice that hemmed in the whole group. There was thus a reciprocal relationship between individual and community: the whole must be freed and to some extent "elevated" before the individual could rise about it, but it was also the success of the talented and exceptional individuals who would help to elevate the group. After chastising a meeting of free blacks in Canada for their shortcomings, Frederick Douglass pointed out they must bear

** Catharine E. Beecher, An Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, with Reference to the Duty oj American Females (Philadelphia 1837), 101-102; pastoral letter from "The General Association of Massachusetts (Orthodox) to the Churches Under Their Care" (1837), in Alice S. Rossi, The Feminist Papers: From Adams to Beauooir (New York 1973), 305; Jonathan F. Stearns, "Discourse on Female Influence" (sermon, 1837), in Aileen S. Kraditor, Up From the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History oj American Feminism (Chicago 1968), 47-50. Sec also IJtwatk, North of Slavery, 103; and Hrotz, cd., Negro Social and Political Thought, 283.

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in mind "that he is closely linked with them; and in proportion as they ascend in the scale of intellectual and moral improvement, so will he; whereas, if they allow themselves to sink into degradation, he also is dragged down along with them." He deplored the jealousy many blacks displayed towards the few who had risen above the general level. "They see colored people occupy a better position, but they say, 'What has Frederick Douglass done for us?' " Douglass did not specify what he and other black leaders whom he named had done for the average black but he implied that they had raised the reputation of the whole race in the eyes of whites and that by their mere existence they ought to raise the self-respect of every black. Some measure of what J . R . Pole has called "equality of esteem" for the whole race or sex had to be wrung out of American society before individual freedom would be truly possible.17 It was essentially as a vital symbol of "equality of esteem" that blacks and feminists demanded the vote. Liberty as equal access, selfdevelopment, and independence, and liberty as membership in the political body of self-governing citizens are logically distinct, and certainly both blacks and women had reason to doubt any easy equation of freedom with republican institutions, and to ask: "of what advantage is it to us to live in a Republic?" It became a commonplace among feminists that republics were in fact particularly inimical to female self-expression outside the home and that women, as women, had more access to political power and a wider range of personal freedom in aristocratic societies. Blacks who traveled to Europe as feted guests of British abolitionists returned to report that they had been free to travel without segregation or insult, had been easily accepted by white society, and had generally felt themselves to be much freer than in democratic, republican America."

" Frederick Douglass, "Advice to My Canadian Brothers and Sisters: An Address Delivered in Chatham, Canada West, on 3 August 1854," and "Self-Help: An Address Delivered in New York, on 7 May 1849," in John W. Blassingame et at., Tht Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1: Speeches, Dtbates, and Interviews, Vol. 2: 1847-1854 (New Haven 1982), 537, 168-169; J. R. Pole, Tht Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley, Calif. 1978), xii-xiii, 150, 302. " Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty," 131; Mary Mott to the Westchester Woman's Rights Convention, 1852, in Stanton el al.. History of Woman Suffrage, I, 829. On blacks' experience of travel abroad see the remarks of Charles Lenox Remond in Foner, ed., Voice of Black Amtrica, 74-75, and Litwack, North of Slavery, 237. The'English naturally liked to rub in the deficiencies of republican America: "Tell the Republicans on your side of the line," said the governor of Upper Canada to a delegation of blacks seeking to settle in Canada, "that we royalists do not know men by their color." Quoted in Litwack, North of Slavery, 73.

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Even so, feminists and black spokesmen insisted on the right of full citizenship in the American republic as the necessary complement of the more private liberty of self-development. While the vote was not the only measure of liberation for antebellum feminists, it was central to them from the beginning. Similarly, every black convention demanded the vote on equal terms with whites. For blacks the issue of the franchise was particularly galling, since in several states after the late 1820s they were in fact disfranchised and deprived of a right that they had once possessed. Yet free blacks were too few to have exercised much real political clout as voters, and while women would certainly have had the power of numbers, much of what feminists wanted, in terms of access and opportunity, could not have been achieved through legislation in the lightly governed America of the early nineteenth century. It was less a question of power, however, than of self-respect. To be excluded from the central ritual of the nation in which they lived was to be deprived of that recognition which was needed to feel oneself a free person." The demand for inclusion in the political community was the most stoudy resisted of all black and feminist demands. White men, too, seem to have regarded political participation through the rituals of party loyalties and electoral contests less as a means to practical ends, or even as the exercise of power, than as an affirmation of an essential equality as men. A republican polity was a fraternal community. Very few white men were prepared to include black men within that fraternity, and even fewer were ready to acknowledge women as brothers. 20 For blacks the symbolic association of suffrage with masculinity made its possession of vital psychological importance. The state of Pennsylvania, claimed a convention of its free black inhabitants, by disfranchising them had "striken a blow at our manhood, and not only ours,

7Carol Groneman (Pernicone), "The 'Bloudy Ould Sixth': A Social Analysis of a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1973). 8

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»•CAS, Sixth Annual Report (1859), p p . 67-68. Brace also notes t h e c o n n e c t i o n of step-parents and child vagrancy in Dangerous Classes, p. 39. "CAS, Fifth Annual Report (1858), p. 61. 40 CAS, Sixth Annual Report (1859), ρ 58. "CAS, Fourth Annual Report (1857), p p . 43-44. ,2 See my essay "Origins of the S w e a t s h o p , " in Working-Class America: Essays in the New Labor History, ed. Michael Frish and Daniel Walkowitz (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), for an e x t e n d e d treatment of this point. " N e w York State Census, 1855, Population Schedules, Ward 4, Electoral district 2, and Ward 17, Electoral district 3, MSS at County Clerk's Office, New York CityAssociation for Improving the Condition of the Poor, Fifteenth Annual Report (New York, 1858), ρ 38. ""Letter r e p r i n t e d in M a t t h e w C a r e y , " E s s a y s o n t h e Public C h a r i t i e s of Philadelphia," Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia, 1830), p. 161. "CAS, Third Annual Report (1856), ρ 27. 46 "Semi-Annual R e p o r t , " p. 58.