The women's organizations and activities that appeared in America in the 1830s were the first in the world to lead to a large continuous women's movement during the succeeding century. During the 17th and 18th centuries women intellectuals had influenced cultural and political thought in France, England, and Germany. Women had formed their own revolutionary networks during the French Revolution. In the mid-1800s British women also began protesting exclusion from the universities and discrimination under the law; some, like Florence Nightingale, became known for their patriotic service and charitable work. But the U. S. women were distinctive in their widespread benevolent associations and early call for suffrage which was widely debated as early as the 1880s and eventually drew the support of a broad coalition of women's groups.

The form of the American feminist movement when reduced to its essentials comprised two major branches, one oriented to upgrading women's domestic role, the other to assuring their voice in the public sphere. Since a parallel dichotomy appears in other historic feminist movements of Scandinavia, and England, Australia, and Canada, as well as the modern era, it is instructive to examine the origins of these two branches and their modes of operation. In America both groups originated in the ideals of American democracy and Protestant individualism. But these ideals when applied to women were everywhere met with contradictory economic and social institutions which subjected women to traditional male authority or questioned their capacity for independence and initiative.

Women responded by forming groups of their own to work for change. The female charitable societies showed that women could make an important contribution to social reform and

social improvement. Women's benevolent associations dealt with all types of human ills from poor mothers and children needing food and clothes to drunken men and prostitutes needing shelter. The women's rights groups, on the other hand, focused primarily on women's dependency and oppression; they discovered how to use the rights of free association and free speech to press for women's official equality under the law.

Together these two types of early women's organizations constructed a new feminist subculture that would give rise to a much larger and more sustained women's movement after the Civil War. According to this culture women were capable of acting on their own behalf as well as for the good of society. They also produced new social and political tactics which would later be used to advance the feminist cause. These inventions included the special-purpose prayer group, the charitable association dedicated to a particular benevolent cause, the annual regional or national meeting for speech-making and gathering of far-flung supporters, the signature-petition to reform specific state laws, and special-interest lobbying for state constitutional amendments and statutes on behalf of women and families. These early organizational discoveries were being used by most of the activist women's associations that emerged after the Civil War.

This chapter will show how the antebellum ferment in women's roles became differentiated into two streams: one, more closely allied with family and religion, which supplied precedents for the post-Civil War women's temperance movement; and the other, more secular and oriented to government and the law, which was carried forward by the women's suffrage movement. Common to both was a fundamental belief in the strength and power of women that was drawn from everyday civil, domestic, and religious experience.

Between 1750 and 1800 the experience of the American Revolution caused a reorientation of thinking about the place of women. Up to that time, women had been expected to manage the

household in clear subordination to the male head and in a manner that was private and uncoordinated with the actions of other women. During the Revolution, however, wives and mothers were asked to support embargoes on foreign imports by banning tea from their tables and substituting homespun for the manufactured fabrics that originated abroad. Their lives became more obviously intertwined with the larger political fortunes of the country. Their contribution was as much to the nation as to their own households. The result was a new sense of their own self-worth and of their importance to the nation. Abigail Adams' famous plea to her husband John, to "Remember the Ladies" at the Continental Congress, conveyed this new spirit of self-confidence and entitlement to citizenship.

Once the Revolution had passed, however, and the Constitution was ratified without formal recognition of their rights, women knew their status to be ambiguous. They were presumably included in those stirring words of the Declaration of Independence, "All men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." But they were expected to continue their deference to husband or father at home and be satisfied that their civil interests were better represented by males than by themselves. Out of the tension between egalitarian and patriarchal ideologies and a rapidly changing domestic economy came a new culture to challenge the old regime and propose new rights for women.

Equality as a democratic principle. Although the American Revolution had prepared the ground for women's representation of their own interests in government, the Constitution was silent on the subject of women's rights. Women had made quite unusual strides during the Revolution by raising money and making sacrifices for the war effort. The Daughters of Liberty in the 1760s had substituted herbs for foreign teas and held massive spinning bees to reduce importation of textiles. They knitted stockings and sewed clothing for the soldiers. Sparked by a broadside, The Sentiments of An American Woman, the first large-scale woman's association was formed in Philadelphia in 1780 to raise money for further compensating the soldiers. Considering it an honor, leading women of the city canvassed all the wards as well as other cities such as Bethlehem and Lancaster to ask women to give up little luxuries for themselves and their families in order to contribute to the added comfort and well-being of the Continental Army. The wife of Pennsylvania's governor was the "treasuress". Similar campaigns were mounted in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia, and the collection was ultimately sent to Martha Washington and then to General Washington himself. The donors had hoped that the sum they collected ($300,000 in continental money which converted into about $7,500 in specie) would be used for something beyond basic necessities. But Washington resisted their idea because thousands of shirts were badly needed instead. The women finally relented and to save money actually helped to sew the shirts themselves. Sadly, however, their monumental efforts were trivialized by some observers who referred to them merely as "General Washington's Sewing Circle."

Women did vote in New Jersey from the 1780s until 1807 when the right was revoked. The New Jersey Constitution was broadly worded in a way that was interpreted as allowing the right of franchise to all citizens who had met the property and tax qualifications. In 1790, a New Jersey election law even referred to voters as "he or she", and by 1800 woman suffrage was so well established that a special constitutional amendment was thought unnecessary. A vote-packing scheme in 1807, however, was unfairly attributed to election abuse by women and blacks, and immediately resulted in their disenfranchisement. Opponents of women's vote claimed that women were weak, subject to influence of husbands or fathers, and therefore not to be trusted with the vote.

In the face of such reverses, thinking women could do little more than read and discuss the works of writers who in the 1790s put forth the major arguments for women's equality, the radical English philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the New England poet and author Judith Sargent Murray, or historian Mercy Otis Warren. Ordinary women could also express their beliefs in domestic equality and independence by adapting their patriotism and democratic instincts to the confines of the feminine role. This is precisely what they accomplished through a focus on the education of patriotic sons and dutiful daughters which has been termed "Republican Motherhood". As "Republican Mothers" they educated their children to become the responsible future citizens of the new nation, thus justifying their own participation in the civic culture. Historian Linda Kerber regards Republican Motherhood as an important cultural invention which spared ordinary women the ridicule unleashed on a radical like Wollstonecraft while at the same time allowing them to join mothering and family life with service to the nation.

The duties of Republican Motherhood required that future mothers themselves be educated. Mary Beth Norton has analyzed the educational background of seventy-nine of the early women leaders described in Notable American Women who were born before 1810. Of those born between 1700 and 1770 only one-fifth had any kind of advanced schooling beyond a simple primary education. But this ratio had risen dramatically by the end of the century to three-fifths of those women born during the 1770s and 1780s and three-fourths of those born between 1800 and 1810.

Before the Revolution girls had been schooled somewhat haphazardly in dame schools and adventure schools set up in private homes. After 1790 middle class and well-to-do families began to see it as their duty to educate their daughters in a boarding school or nearby academy. The result was a marked improvement in women's literacy and capacity to teach their own children. At the same time the graduates of the academies raised the standard of teaching and created the first real profession for women. Some of the most famous of the early academy graduates later founded schools of their own. Emma Willard in 1819 appealed to the New York State legislature to support her female seminary at Troy. Hundreds of graduates of the Troy Female Seminary later became teachers on the expanding frontier. Catherine Beecher established a female seminary at Hartford, Connecticut in 1823, the Western Female Institute near Cincinnati, and a normal school in Milwaukee. Mary Lyon helped to plan the Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts) which opened in 1835; she also founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837 which later became Mount Holyoke College.

Education would turn out to be the key that unlocked the door of women's domestic confinement. The earliest statement of feminist sentiment came out of a female academy, Miss Sarah Pierce's famous school in Litchfield, Connecticut. On July 4, 1839, in words that both echoed the Declaration of Independence of 1775 and foreshadowed the July Fourth Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848, the "Humble Address of a Thousand Federal Maids" stated the nature of the injustices done to women in their exclusion from the public weal:

Here was truly a manifestation of "role strain." Women who were more educated than many of their fellow male citizens were protesting their exclusion from governing their own lives as well as the larger society. Mary Beth Norton has described their expression of a new sense of citizenship through living the woman's role.

In this manner the political and patriotic element of American culture gave justification for women to broaden their roles.

Equality as a religious principle. Religion also helped to legitimate women's quest for equality. Of the five women who planned the Seneca Falls convention in the summer of 1848, four were Quakers. Historian Margaret Bacon has asked why the tiny Religious Society of Friends contributed such a disproportionate number of leaders to the feminist cause. It turns out that Quakerism was a veritable seedbed for the new feminism. As early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Quaker women had served as traveling ministers, on occasion leaving behind husbands and children, so strongly did they feel called to do the Lord's work. Well before the Revolution the American Friends had also established a tradition of separate women's business meetings of the monthly meeting. In addition, Quaker women who felt moved by the Holy Spirit to speak in meeting were expected to do so. Finally, the Quakers believed in education for all--rich and poor, girls and boys. Thus the four Quaker women who planned the Seneca Falls Convention were building on more than a century of precedent within Quaker communities for women's independent organization and initiative in causes which they felt to be morally right.

More broadly, one might ask why religion was so intimately involved in the activities of the early feminists -- visible both in the religious affiliations of the early leaders and the religious coloration of their work. They met in churches; they opened their meetings with prayer; they received support from certain members of the clergy and from larger bodies of church people. In terms of the collective behavior theory put forward in Chapter 1, religion was important to American women's early involvement in feminism because it provided a partial solution to the problem of role strain. The one outlet for independent thought and action which early nineteenth century American women had open to them was religious expression. While St. Paul had said that wives should be subject to their husbands, it was also written in the Book of Galatians that "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus." This ideal of equality of all God's children, coupled with the Protestant tradition of individualism and the priesthood of all believers, rejected ecclesiastical hierarchy and infused the feminists with courage to challenge prevailing beliefs.

During the same period American religion became "feminized", not in the sense of becoming weak or effeminate, but instead open to women's experience and influenced by their moral and social perspectives. This remarkable reorientation of culture is detailed by Mary Ryan in her account of women's religious activity during the Second Great Awakening in Utica, New York in the 1830s and 1840s. Women and youths were the great majority of converts when evangelists like the renowned Charles Finney preached to camp meetings and revivals calling for repentance and commitment to a godly life.

Why should women have been so responsive to this religious ferment? Ryan follows the lead of Whitney Cross who showed in the Burned Over District that the great social movements which swept across upstate New York prior to the Civil War (the anti-Masonic movement, temperance, Mormonism, suffrage, and the utopian Oneida Community) found a fertile field along the Erie Canal. The growing towns which bordered the canal had experienced rapid social change, in-migration, and consequent ferment in their community life. The women who responded to the evangelists, according to Ryan, were especially likely to be wives of entrepreneurs, not the poorest of the community, but members of families who had some leisure.

Nancy Cott discovered a similar preoccupation with religious matters in the letters and diaries of one hundred women who lived in the first half of the nineteenth century. She quotes the English traveler Harriet Martineau who had observed that women "pursue religion as an occupation" because they were constrained from exercising their full range of moral, intellectual, and physical powers in other ways. Religious activity thus seems to have served a function parallel to an occupation for men: it helped women to define their identity at the same time that it helped them to overcome isolation and form bonds with others in the community.

Religion in nineteenth-century America thus offered women a solution to the conflict in their daily lives between having heavy responsibility and little power. The revivals helped to bridge the conflict between independence and submission by emphasizing the importance of women's self-reflection and self-improvement and their influence over their families and the life of the community around them. Transcendentalism, a radical movement among New England Congregationalists and Unitarians called for just this sort of inner reflection and social reform. Prominent among the Transcendentalists were Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May), who educated both boys and girls in his progressive child-oriented school, and Margaret Fuller, a leading feminist thinker who in her writings and living room "conversations" in the 1840s in Boston projected new attitudes which assumed the equality of women in matters of intellect and morality. Outside Boston at Brook Farm, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcotts, and other leading Transcendentalists briefly experimented with a means to live out their ideals through a communal life.

But the most important and lasting legacy of women's religious activity, as well as of Transcendentalism, was a reorientation of popular culture which began to give a larger place to the values and influence of women. Women's intuition and emotional insight were especially valued by the new religious leaders of the era. No longer were people expected to prostrate themselves before an angry God. They valued instead the capacity to understand the universe and the Creator. In Women of the Nineteenth Century (1843), Margaret Fuller links women's strength to their inner sense of truth and right: "Women who speak in public, if they have a moral power..., that is, if they speak for conscience' sake, ..invariably subdue the prejudices of their hearers..." At the same time, each sex is the better if it shares the strengths of the other: "There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman." As Goethe said, "The excellent woman is she, who, if the husband dies, can be a father to the children.'"

Thus Quakerism, the new Evangelism, and Transcendentalism equipped women in the early nineteenth century for challenging the existing social order. Women from these religious traditions especially would question their confined and subordinate roles with a confidence and fervor born of inner conviction.

The need for women's equality in the home. After the Revolution American women also saw a possibility for equality in domestic affairs. As grown persons, sometimes with more wealth or intellectual ability than a husband or guardian, they were supposed to submit to the rule of men and to a traditional patriarchal code of behavior which was rapidly becoming outmoded and dysfunctional. Demographic and economic changes in family life were making possible greater choice in marriage, fertility, and employment, yet women's domestic rights were not expanding at the same pace. Women could live with inequality by accepting the ideology of submissiveness and domesticity, or they could reject it and attempt to change the status quo through protests and legal action. In actuality, both types of adaptation occurred.

The new demographic and economic realities. The net effect of a falling birth rate and a rising life expectancy was to give women more time at their disposal. Advances in technology were also taking many productive tasks such as spinning out of the home to small mills and factories where teenagers and young people of both sexes were employed as workers. The effect showed in the statistics. Between 1800 and 1860 the birth rate dropped by nearly a third from 278 to 184 per thousand women of childbearing age. At the same time life expectancy was improving from around 35 years before the American Revolution to over 50 years for persons born in the 1880s. Urban occupations were also increasing and more women had paid employment. Between 1820 and 1860 the proportion of non-farm workers grew from 28 percent to 41 percent, and by 1870 urban workers constituted half of all the employed.

Families changed as a result of greater longevity, lower fertility, and the gradual process of industrialization. Marriages, rather than being arranged by parents, were now much more likely to be based on the young couple's own desires than on property considerations. The opening of the frontier and the rise of individual enterprise made women's independence more important. A two-sphere theory of sex differences developed in which men's world was understood to be business affairs and women's world that of the household. Families became more child-centered, and women focused much of their energy on motherhood. Some married later, and others remained single.

The cult of domesticity. These new developments brought elaboration and extension of women's domestic roles. Barbara Welter has described four qualities that were celebrated in the "cult of domesticity" or "true womanhood": piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. Women between 1830 and 1850 were especially praised if they accepted their separate sphere in the home and were religious, somewhat asexual, but morally pure and submitted to parental or spousal authority. Their homes were to be havens of rest from the busy world where they sheltered men and children and upheld the noble virtues and higher motives which they as women were particularly qualified to represent.

Catherine Beecher, the leading exponent of practical domesticity, described the rational and ordered running of a household but also conveyed a larger moral vision that charged women with the principal responsibility for influencing children's character as well as the character of the whole nation. In the 1820s she developed a moral philosophy which transcended the evangelistic piety of the era and encouraged her students to rely on individual conscience. In the Treatise on Domestic Economy, Beecher (1841) gave advice on health, diet, domestic architecture, and household management for being a competent housewife and mother (such as cooking, infant care, laundry, and candle-making). She continually sought teachers to fill a pressing need in the West; the schools that she founded in Ohio and Wisconsin during the 1840s and 1850s were largely devoted to training future teachers. Because teachers in new towns frequently preceded the minister, they were often chiefly responsible for setting the tone of the community. Beecher envisioned a community which could coalesce around its women, if not the church.

Thus, despite the cult of domesticity which called for submissiveness, women were applying the ideal of Republican Motherhood to society itself and the governance of their families, thereby living out Beecher's moral philosophy of teaching and serving others.

This ideal of service would combine with Republican Motherhood to provide one of the strong motives behind the many women's benevolent and charitable associations which blossomed in the 1830s and 1840s.

DOMESTIC FEMINISM AND CHARITABLE WORK

Just as the Enlightenment brought a rational critique of monarchy and helped to spawn the American Revolution and Republican Motherhood, so also the Enlightenment caused a critical reappraisal of religion which resulted in spiritual revivals and widespread conversions in both England and America. Religious feelings, infused with new and immediate meaning, inspired personal change and individual perfectionism. For women of the early nineteenth century, whose domain was the home, the personal meaning of conversion was worked out in their care for family and friends. Their

world was not yet so much divided between private and public as between earthly and eternal. Friendship was of great emotional and intellectual importance because it could transcend religious, political, and economic differences which sometimes divided one family member from another. For these reasons, historian Irene Brown suggests that friendship became one of the key preoccupations of 18th and 19th century men and women. And in the tension between earthly and eternal, friendship could even transcend death.

The possibility of friendship allowed women to extend their emotional relationships and domestic skills beyond the family without having to take up the uncertain and risky entrepreneurial activities of men. Following the American Revolution, women began organizing themselves to help other women, most often widows and poor children. Soon various other benevolent and missionary associations were formed to assist and educate a wide range of people including "heathen" women and children both at home and abroad.

As commerce and travel increased during the 1820s and 1830s, and cities grew, women withdrew from farm work and became more specialized in child-rearing and family care. Along side various charitable and benevolent associations sprang up a great number of maternal associations and moral reform societies to address new threats of sexual temptation and drunkenness which appeared along with rapid population growth and migration in the burgeoning cities and towns. Moral reform societies to end prostitution and temperance societies to end drunkenness gained enormous popularity after 1830. Both, however, introduced a new element into women's activism which was no longer focused on women alone but made new demands on men.

When men began to accuse women of ranging beyond their proper sphere, reform-minded women responded by asserting their moral and spiritual equality with men. This confrontation between men and women coincided with a nascent structural change that by 1850 had begun to distinguish the private world of the family from the public world of business and government. Male leaders in foreign missions, moral reform, and temperance all asserted that women should only work for these good causes but not vote or take leadership because their place was in the home. Thus for women to be able to cross the divide into public life a new argument was required: that women were at least the equals of men in the home, and that their homemaker qualities were also needed in public life, a stance that has since been termed "domestic feminism".

Women's arguments that their mothering should extend outside the home took a number of different forms--benevolence, foreign missions, moral reform, and temperance. While some women belonged to several such organizations, it seems clear that there was no simple progression by which the earlier benevolent or missionary groups evolved into later moral reform or temperance societies. Instead these many different causes taken together had the effect of pushing out the walls of women's traditional roles in a way that helped lay the foundation for educational and political emancipation. Domestic feminism not only led to equal rights feminism; it also opened the first major path to women's participation and equality in public life.

Benevolent associations. From 1800 to 1830, simple charity along with religious work, was the main activity of organized women's groups. One of the earliest and best known examples was the New York Society for Aid to Widows and Poor Children founded in 1796 by Isabella Marshall Graham. An educated woman, Graham grew up in Scotland, but when widowed, endured poverty and supported herself by a school for children in her home. After immigrating to New York City in 1789 and opening a very successful school for girls, Graham sought ways to help other women who were faced with sudden poverty. The New York Society provided material help, work, and a temporary home for "worthy poor" -- respectable women in reduced circumstances. Its work caught the imagination of others and by 1820 there were branches or followers in Portland, Boston, Providence, Philadelphia, and other smaller cities. Historians have discovered scores of similar women's charitable organizations in the three decades between 1800 and 1830: for example, the Newburyport Orphan association founded in 1803, the Female Benevolent Society of New York City to help abandoned females, or the Boston Female Refuge society which appeared in 1821.

These charitable associations of the early 1800s seem distinctive in their generosity devoid of moralistic judgment. Rather than condescension, they offered help in a way that implied equality of spirit if not of wealth. Historian Anne Firor Scott notes that the clientele were the "worthy poor" who in background were similar to the members of the philanthropic societies but were simply thought to have fallen on hard times. Such friendly and sympathetic efforts which extended women's nurturing activities beyond the home showed women capable of wider pursuits. In addition, by stretching the boundaries of "woman's sphere", these benevolent associations prepared the ground for the rise of feminism. In the words of Anne Boylan, "They justified women's organizational activity as the extension of the mothering role and succeeded in making legitimate women's desire for public roles."

Missionary societies. Home and foreign missions provided fields where women might live out their religious hopes and ideals. Missionaries and their wives traveled to India, China, Africa, and the American West, not so much to change a whole "heathen" society as to serve as living examples of Christian life. Missionary couples introduced the Bible, taught reading and writing, and showed foreign women a model much nearer to equality of husband and wife than permitted in Hindu, Mohammedan, or Buddhist custom. The Reverend Jonathan Allen when preaching his farewell sermon for Adoniram and Ann Hazeltine Judson, before they left for Burma in 1812, expressed such hopes: "It will be your business, my dear children, to teach these women, to whom your husbands can have but little or no access. Go then, and do all in your power, to enlighten their minds, and bring them to the knowledge of truth. Go, and if possible, raise their character to the dignity of rational beings, and to the rank of Christians in a Christian land. Teach them to realize that they are not an inferior race of creatures; but stand upon a par with men."

Missionary societies were set up to provide material support, Bibles, and tracts for the home and foreign mission field. The concept of cent and tract societies was inaugurated around 1800 when someone hit upon the idea of making some small daily sacrifice as a means of contribution to the purchase and distribution of Bibles and other religious literature. By 1818 several thousand women in New England alone were contributing 52 cents a year to organizations with such worthy goals as distributing Bibles or contributing funds for missionary efforts at home or abroad. By 1820 these tract societies were supplemented and partly eclipsed by the burgeoning foreign missionary societies which were based on a similar philosophy of asking women to make small domestic sacrifices in order to further the spread of Christianity. While missionary societies had both male and female members, women predominated, comprising roughly three-fifths of the membership and contributing as much as two-thirds of the moneys raised--a remarkable feat given most women's lack of independent income.

Between 1800 and 1850 women's missionary societies were the single most common form of female voluntary association: Why were they so popular? Perhaps most important, they were a natural extension of church membership and required no radical departure from traditional expectations of women in connection with Christian duties. But the immense popularity of the biographies of missionary heroines like Ann Judson suggests that women were also inspired by the challenge of the missionary's task as well as the example of the missionary wife. Ordinary women could identify both with heathen woman being educated and with the missionary who was educating her.³⁷

By trying to improve the inferior position of women in other lands, American women could be thankful for their own good fortune. They particularly deplored the harems, seclusion, and cruel treatment that Muslim women were said to endure in India and other Asian countries. By sending women missionaries there was a hope that they could surmount these barriers to reach their pagan sisters through education, teaching them to read, and to follow what was felt to be the superior and more civilized marriage and community practices of the Christian world.³⁸ Women living isolated or monotonous lives in rural America appeared to identify with missionary wives and vicariously participate in their success and sacrifice.

The life of the missionary wife was embodied in the thrilling story of Ann Hazeltine Judson. She struggled to get her missionary husband released from prison in Burma, safeguarded his translation of the Bible, smuggled gifts into the prison, pleaded with the viceroy for his freedom, bore a child during this ordeal, and ultimately succeeded in her husband's release only to die shortly after in 1826. Such a stirring account given by her husband who survived told of a remarkably shrewd and intelligent woman, able to act independently through adversity, yet also imbued with a Christian vision of the importance of teaching the Bible and the Burmese women and children how to read. The story not only lifted women out of their daily round; the story of Mrs. Judson also embodied women's independence and a nobility of character which conveyed the spirited and intellectual equality of women rather than inferiority and subordination, a spirit that historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg has aptly termed "religious feminism."³⁹

Maternal associations and moral reform. While women's charities and missions extended Christian friendship to the less fortunate and expressed American women's implicit belief in their own spiritual equality with men, a new kind of organization emerged around 1820 which recognized and tried to control a new and threatening element in women's experience--isolation and loneliness in the burgeoning cities and new towns which in some instances could lead to economic and sexual exploitation. First appeared maternal associations between 1810 and 1830 whose purpose was the preparation of children to resist sexual and other forms of moral temptation. Then, beginning in the 1830s came moral reform societies that tried to help prostitutes and stamp out the economic and sexual exploitation of women.

One of the first accounts of maternal associations appears in 1815 in Portland, Maine, where mothers every few weeks would bring their children to their women's meetings, using these occasions for religious instruction and cautionary examples to warn against unbridled sexuality and drunkenness. In Utica and Whitestown, New York, where many such groups appeared during the 1820s and 1830s, it appears that parents were anxious about the uncertainties of the new commercial culture and mothers were trying to instill inner controls in their children which would substitute for the family controls of an earlier era.⁴⁰

Maternal associations sprang up in many cities and towns alongside the charitable and benevolent associations, the cent and tract, and missionary societies. Many women had memberships in more than one such women's group. Where the maternal associations went beyond the earlier charitable and religious groups was in drawing moral lessons in order to protect and improve the lives of children in their own families and friendship circles. Not surprisingly perhaps, Ryan's analysis of these groups' membership in upstate New York shows them to be of the small business and artisan class, a segment of the population in a rapidly growing commercial culture who were especially sensitive to the individualizing effects of urbanization and loss of extended family ties.⁴¹ At the same time in New England, similar associations sprang up which also seemed to be responding to major social change in the larger society: girls coming off the farms to work in the textile mills of Lowell; young people moving to Boston unattached and alone; or single young people living in boarding houses in the industrializing towns of western Massachusetts.⁴²

Moral reform societies honed the diffuse anxieties of the maternal association about sexual temptation and focused on prostitution, the economic conditions which gave rise to it, and the men who supported it. In the 1820s, the Boston Seamen's Society and the Providence Association for Employment of Women added an element of activism to their help: they tried to raise women's wages, "the profit of the needle," so that indigents could survive on sewing or other available domestic occupations.⁴³ The New York Moral Reform Society founded in 1834 had within a few years 445 auxiliaries in other cities and rural areas. The Boston Moral Reform Society founded in 1835 could likewise count 131 rural auxiliaries by 1839.⁴⁴ The Boston Society for Employing the Poor, in 1836 noted some husbands' improvidence and abuse.⁴⁵ These associations found prostitutes, provided them with shelter, and tried to help them find respectable employment. Some of the societies also briefly published the names of men who visited brothels, but for this they were told they were "out of their sphere", and soon desisted. By the 1840s, however, the Boston group had succeeded in campaigning for anti-seduction laws and getting them passed.⁴⁶

Historians have noted the hostility to men that permeated much of women's early activity in moral reform as well as their feelings of sisterhood as they identified with each other as women. Their purpose was to be rid of sexual license and the double standard by prodding the conscience of American males with respect to chastity and adultery.⁴⁷ At the same time they wanted to train sons and daughters to a standard of premarital celibacy and virginity. By 1837 the Advocate of Moral Reform, the newspaper of the movement, had a national circulation of 16,500 which published names of men who patronized prostitutes.⁴⁸ Women, by challenging the double standard of male prerogatives, brought their own standard into public view and in the process learned to associate, cooperate, and articulate an agenda for change. These activities seem to have been the first involvement of women in trying to accomplish change through governmental action, and thus set an important precedent for women's action in the political realm.

Women's temperance groups. As in the case of women's charities and missionary societies, women had long been connected to temperance work. The Society of Friends in 1760, the Conference of the Methodist Church, in 1780, and the Universalists in 1800 had all declared themselves opposed to use of alcoholic spirits.⁴⁹ The Finney revivals of 1814 to 1838 had linked conversion to signing a pledge never to drink wine or spirits. In Utica in the 1840s, for example, eight thousand persons signed the pledge.⁵⁰ As a result temperance work was as much a natural extension of the Christian life as training children through the maternal associations or trying to stamp out sexual license and moral corruption through the moral reform societies. However, in the 1840s and 1850s women's temperance activities outstripped the earlier forms of women's benevolence as women's auxiliaries sprouted from the Washingtonian Society, the Sons of Temperance, and the Independent Order of Good Templars. In Cincinnati the Daughters of Temperance, founded in 1846, had 200 members by 1848 and a total national membership of 30,000. The Independent Order of Good Templars in Ohio had three lodges in 1854 and 176 lodges by 1856. By 1857, the organization counted 80,000 members in the nation as a whole.⁵¹ At the same time sporadic incidents of women's collective action against saloons began to appear.⁵²

Of all the women's groups which flourished before 1850, temperance associations created the most direct path to women's organized political activity. Like the moral reform groups, temperance concerned men's behavior -- drunkenness, abuse, and non-support of wives and children. The movement also evolved from an emphasis on individual moral change (such as signing the pledge or cooking without alcohol) to a recognition that legislative change (such as the Maine prohibition law of 1851) was also needed. But unlike moral reform, temperance addressed a more widespread problem and produced a broader based movement. Alcohol was the third most important industrial product in 1810, accounting for nearly ten percent of total national manufacturing output. Per capita consumption in 1840 was approximately three times what it was in 1940.⁵³ Miss Martineau noted intemperance even among women: "It is no secret on the spot, that the habit of intemperance is not infrequent among women of station and education in the most enlightened parts of the country.  I witnessed some instances and heard of more.  It does not seem to me to be regarded with all the dismay which such a symptom ought to excite."⁵⁴

In the early 1840s Martha Washingtonians (women's groups devoted to temperance) established over forty chapters in New York City alone. The group trained and gave domestic employment to women alcoholics and their children and collected and donated clothing to victims of drunkenness and their needy families.⁵⁵ As the Washingtonian movement waned, fraternal orders and temperance sisterhoods took their place. Reformers of the 1850s drew on the language of family life by expressing concern for family members through avoiding alcohol in cooking and medicine. At the same time they translated the effects of drunkenness into the cash terms of the market place -- inebriates who could neither work productively and save money, nor support those dependent on them.⁵⁶

Thus like a catalyst in a chemical solution, the introduction of the temperance cause into the unsettled rural society becoming urban in the 1830s to 1850s suddenly shifted the discourse of women's benevolence from the language of friendship and reconciliation between earthly and eternal to the language of equal rights and the bridging of private and public. The Sons of Temperance Convention in Syracuse in 1852 and the World's Temperance Convention in New York City in 1853 brought these issues to a head. On both occasions women delegates were not seated on the convention floor and were not allowed to speak. In the New York Women's Temperance Convention held in Rochester in April of 1852 and the World's Temperance Convention in New York which followed the World convention in 1853, women spoke their minds and attacked the unfair system which gladly accepted their money, their work, and their silent acquiescence but refused their participation when they tried to speak or vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the 1852 New York Women's Temperance Convention in Rochester, promised, "We shall do much when the pulpit, the forum, the professor's chair, and the ballot-box are ours"; and then outlined the list of claims to come: