Introduction

In 1846 someone put a question to Sarah R. Ingraham, corresponding secretary of the American Female Moral Reform Society, which she shared in her annual report for that year:

‘Has there ever been, in any age or portion of the world, a voluntary Female Benevolent Association, existing for twelve years, covering so wide an extant of country as this—composed of so many thousands, and enlisting so much sympathy on the one hand and opposition on the other?’

It was a fitting question at that juncture in the history of female moral reform, and one that she, with an intense historical self-consciousness characteristic of antebellum reformers, rose to eagerly:

The answer to this inquiry must be in the negative; and exhibiting as it does, what God has wrought, is not the view sufficient to turn the eye from the creature and fix it alone upon His condescending love, and wonder-working grace. ¹

This book joins the secretary in affirming moral reform as a women’s cause in the 1830s and ’40s. Unlike Mrs. Ingraham, it focuses on those earthly agents who made the cause their own, while giving their religious perspective its due. The premise of this book is that unlike the other leading reform movements of the time—antislavery and temperance—moral reform quickly became a thoroughly feminized movement, not only in membership, but in leadership and agenda, and partly for that reason, just as quickly faded. In the antebellum period, female numerical predominance was of course common in evangelical religion and benevolence. But 2moral reform was the first reform movement to become almost exclusively the cause of women.