ABSTRACT
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 168reform movements. The American Female Moral Reform 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. 2 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.
