ABSTRACT
If we were looking for a prime instance of the typical female moral reformer, we could not find a better one than Mary Whitney Godding, leader of the Female Moral Reform Society of Winchendon, a town on the Massachusetts state line just below Rindge, New Hampshire. Born into one of the town’s longest settled and most respected families, she married Alvah God-ding, a Bowdoin Medical College-trained doctor, shortly after his arrival in town in 1826. Besides this utterly Yankee pedigree and location in the epicenter of rural New England female moral reform, our attention fastens on the religious, reform, and political commitments of this couple. Both joined the Congregational Church, perhaps in the aftermath of the 1831 revival or the local event led by their revivalist pastor, the Rev. Daniel Morton, in 1835–36. In any event Mary Godding joined in organizing the FMRS in 1836, and about the same time Dr. Godding, together with the clergy and “many of the most influential citizens,” founded a total abstinence temperance society. The following year Mary Godding’s signature headed three surviving antislavery petitions sent from Winchendon to the Twenty-Fifth U. S. Congress. In 1840, her husband was one of two citizens of the town to vote for James G. Birney, the Liberty Party presidential candidate. 1
