The First of Causes to Our Sex

The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834-1848

Daniel S. Wright

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135524357
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The First of Causes to Our Sex is a study of the first movement in the United States for social change by and for women. Female moral reform in the 1830s and '40s was a campaign to abolish sexual vice and the sexual double standard, and to promote sexual abstinence among the young as they entered the marriage market. The movement has earned a place in U.S. women's history, but most research has focused on it as an urban phenomenon, and sought its significance in relation to the cause of women's rights or to the regulation of prostitution. This study explores the appeal of moral reform to rural women, who were the vast majority of its constituency, and sees it as a response to seminal changes in family formation and family size in the context of an increasingly market-oriented and mobile society. It was led by Yankee women who were fired by Second Great Awakening revivals and supported by reformist clergy.

Chapter One
The Feminization of Moral Reform

For their annual meeting in 1838, the leadership of the New York Female Moral Reform Society decided to do something different. Following the precedent of the women’s antislavery convention the previous year, the moral reformers decided to hold a large women’s convention in the city.¹ As nominally auxiliary to men’s moral reform organizations, NYFMRS annual meetings had heretofore been presided over by men, the women having no chance to speak publicly about their own work. But now, with the current male parent organization, the American Moral Reform Society, edging toward nonexistence, the time seemed ripe to hold a meeting of women led by women. Accordingly, the call went out, notice cards were printed and distributed, and as the May anniversary gathering at the Third Free Church approached, it appeared that some nine hundred women from all over the country would be present. But there was a last-minute hitch. To the consternation of the meeting organizers, “it was found at a late period, that many gentlemen planned to attend.” What to do? In 1837 the antislavery conventioneers had simply barred male intruders from the meeting place.² But presumably these “gentlemen” would be supporters. If the meeting was now to be a “promiscuous assembly,” gender conventions of the day dictated that men preside over the proceedings, and the furor aroused by the Grimké sisters’ recent defiance of the rule had hardly subsided.³ Should the moral reform women then abandon their plans and let the meeting proceed as in years before? The Advocate of Moral Reform’s account of the hastily planned accommodation makes for interesting reading:

… [I]t was thought best to make the remaining arrangements, as far as possible, with a view to a union meeting of ladies and gentlemen. Still, as it was a ladies’ society, and the reports must necessarily be read by the Secretary and Treasurer, since it was too late to procure a [male] reader, it was decided that the First Directress should preside, and the gentlemen should be invited to open the meeting with prayer, and address the audience.⁴

In the event, over three hundred men showed up. After the formal proceedings, they left, and the women were at last free to conduct business on their own. Yet it was not the women’s convention the planners had envisioned. The shared leadership of the “union meeting”—the female officers delivering their reports, the clerics blessing them with sermons and prayers—was an accommodation to the presence of men. Still, it was a defiance of gender rules. It would not be repeated at future FMRS annual meetings. By the same token, neither would men again attempt to impose upon such a meeting. That fall, the Boston Female Moral Reform Society was able to hold a women-only annual meeting without a hitch.⁵

What were the intentions of those three hundred men? The Advocate of Moral Reform put the kindest construction on the affair, saying that the printed cards invited one and all to the meeting “without limitation of sex,” so that men could believe they were at least not uninvited. Were they friendly and supportive, were they simply curious, or were they trying to break up the meeting? It is hard to say, especially when the AMRS anniversary, held just two days earlier, made no mention of the up-coming women’s gathering. In his annual report to the men’s group, Secretary Eli Whitney recounted a history of moral reform which managed to avoid any reference to women.⁶ These strange omissions, as we shall see, reflected rising tensions between men and women in the movement amidst a general climate of hostility to female activists’ challenges to spheres doctrine. This backdrop suggests that the unbidden male presence at the women’s convention was not so much a sign of disapproval as it was a gesture aimed at reasserting male oversight of moral reform. By this time, however, female predominance in moral reform had advanced to a point where last-minute gestures by uncomfortable men could not affect the reality on the ground. The meeting planners’ determination not to give up the floor to men, however well-intentioned, reflected on their part a growing confidence that moral reform was uniquely and properly women’s work. This disruption was the last gasp of male pretension to control of moral reform. In this light, the incident shows that it had become truly a women’s cause.

This chapter narrates how this state of affairs—the feminization of moral reform—came about in the leading moral reform organizations in their urban setting. Some of this institutional history has been related elsewhere, but this chapter brings together the many players in New York and Boston and highlights the interaction between them—the connections, differences, rivalries, and the waxing and waning of one group at the expense of another.⁷ It also brings in what little we know about female moral reform in Philadelphia as an illuminating contrast to developments in the other two cities. Of crucial importance in this interwoven narrative are the differing ecclesiastical climates of these cities. In broad outline, this is a story of how women grew from timidity and inexperience to confidence and competence as moral reformers. Intertwined with it here is a less well-known story of this growth in the face of overbearing clerical sponsorship in New York and apathy and opposition in Boston. In New York, male moral reformers moved from whole-hearted endorsement of female moral reform, to ambivalence as their role as sponsors atrophied, and finally to a forlorn attempt to reassert moral reform as a worthy cause for men. The emergence of moral reform as a women’s cause owed as much to the failure of men’s moral reform to thrive as it did to the conscious effort of female reformers to succeed. At the same time, for the feminization process to be complete, another step had to be taken: against all male pretension, women had to declare the cause as their own.

Beginnings in New York City

While women had long been involved in the work of urban Magdalen societies to reclaim prostitutes, earlier campaigns to improve public morality had been an exclusively male preserve.⁸ The moral societies which spread across New England between 1790 and 1815 belonged to the era of defensive reaction by Federalists and Calvinist clergy who feared democracy and disestablishment. Alarmed by a perceived climate of spreading licentiousness, they sought to restore the moral oversight of local communities by the mercantile and clerical elite from a vantage point above the rancorous politics of the day. Even as Rev. Lyman Beecher and other clergy were seeking to shore up the old order, ironically, by promoting moral societies they contributed to the beginnings of a new social order based on voluntary associationism. The agenda of these societies was broad: they attempted to combat drunkenness and gambling as well as sexual vice. As a mobilization of the “better part of the community” to set an example of personal improvement, monitor sundry manifestations of public immorality, and encourage magistrates to enforce existing statutes, the moral societies never considered women as appropriate candidates even for auxiliary support.⁹

The involvement of women in moral reform had to await two ideological innovations. Significantly, both of these occurred in heat of the Finneyite revivals which swept the city and the nation in 1831 and 1832.¹⁰ First, in the evolving evangelical ideology of gender, female moral sensitivity was recast as a potential force for social reform, rather than a thing too delicate for sordid social realities. Second, the need for a broader reform of public attitudes was rediscovered and advanced in a new campaign against prostitution under the banner of “prevention.” Both of these new formulations were achieved almost single-handedly by the Rev. John R. McDowall, who, soon after he arrived in New York in 1830, became chaplain of the newly organized New York Magdalen Society and launched a campaign to expose brothels and their male patronage.¹¹ At the close of his famous Magdalen Report, detailing the purported extent of prostitution in the city, McDowall issued an “appeal to the virtuous females of our city”:

Ye highly favored women! whom a merciful Providence has preserved in the path of virtue and shielded from the shafts of reproach; who are blessed with all the mild charities of virtuous and domestic society, and cheered by the hopes and consolations of divine religion;—say can you be insensible or inactive in such a cause as this?… We see you… animated by benevolence, and glowing with zeal, step forward to save these perishing daughters of sorrow and affliction.… We behold you in short employing all the peculiar influence of your sex,—and in all your relations as wives, mothers, daughters, sisters, in promoting the interests and success of an Institution which… is founded for the relief of the miserable of your own sex, exclusively.¹²

The “Institution” McDowall was contemplating in 1831 came into being the following year—the New York Female Benevolent Society, a female version of the earlier male-run Magdalen asylums.¹³ So began his drive not only to involve women, but to transfer his moral purity campaign effectively over to them.

As a result of the torrent of opposition to his exposés, McDowall and his supporters soon decided that such tactics would not solve the growing problem of prostitution, and that a new approach—prevention—was needed. This time, women would be involved at the ground level, albeit as auxiliaries and under male guidance. At first he sought to promote this new phase of moral reform through writing. In the same year as he oversaw the formation of the NYFBS, he joined forces with Rev. William Goodell, at the time an energetic temperance publisher and lecturer, to publish a new biweekly, the Female Advocate. This was the first moral reform paper addressed to women. Apparently dissatisfied with shared editorship, however, McDowall and Goodell parted company. In January, 1833, each launched his own separate monthly—McDowall’s Journal, and the Journal of Public Morals.¹⁴ Goodell’s was the more cautious publication. McDowall continued to attract severe opposition. The following year, a grand jury declared his Journal a public nuisance, and the Third Presbytery of New York, where he held his credentials as an ordained minister, advised him to abandon publication.¹⁵

This was only the beginning of McDowall’s difficulties with that ecclesiastical authority. But he persevered in his effort to shift the work of moral reform to female organizations. Convinced of the futility of asylum work, he left the employ of the Female Benevolent Society later in 1833. With other prominent evangelicals, he joined in blessing the formation of the New York Female Moral Reform Society in 1834. Conceived in direct opposition to the New York Female Benevolent Society, the new women’s group was the result of an exodus by several McDowall supporters from the NYFBS amid bitter debate over the reclamation vs. prevention issue. Essentially, the NYFMRS took over from where McDowall’s now largely discredited crusade left off. In 1835 the female moral reformers acquired his Journal, renaming it the Advocate of Moral Reform, and retooling it into a prime agent for the formation of female auxiliaries nationwide.¹⁶

The NYFMRS, however, was not a women’s society unto itself. It was organized as an auxiliary to the male American Society for Promoting the Observance of the Seventh Commandment, which had itself been organized only the year previous.¹⁷ At first, the women labored to keep up at least the appearance of operating as an auxiliary to the Seventh Commandment Society. The leadership sought the advice and counsel of their clerical sponsors. Annual meetings in New York City were held as part of those of the male society, with clergy conducting the official business of the NYFMRS and reading its reports.¹⁸ All the while, the NYFMRS leadership protested, or pretended to protest, that they had taken to the field only because men had failed to come up to the work. Defending their acquisition of McDowall’s paper, they turned the ideology of true womanhood in its most restrictive sense back on their critics:

If ever there was a field, from which the timid nature and shrinking delicacy of woman should move her to retire, or one that imperiously demanded the strength, wisdom, and courage of man, this is the one: the cause not only demands the aid of men, but men of strength and bravery, men that will no...