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The Emergence of Female Activism in US History
By Anne Firor Scott
From Natural
Allies
Many women were content to remain in the safe confines of the benevolent
society; others responded to the electric atmosphere of the antebellum
years with daring forays into public activism. The ideology of “true
womanhood” convinced some women that they should exercise the
moral power, said to be peculiarly theirs, only at home, but others
were beginning to argue that their responsibility extended to the
larger society. Though reformers often ventured forth in company
with men, they exhibited a strong propensity to form all-women organizations,
which they could run to suit themselves. Prostitution, the double
standard, alcohol, and slavery were the social issues that first
brought women into public notice. In undertaking to deal with such
explosive questions they began to behave in ways hitherto considered
not entirely proper and to invade territory long reserved for men.
The opposition they encountered stimulated some women to think about
their own restricted legal and social status.
Whatever combination of forces was attracting more men to active
involvement in public life and making them less and less willing
to defer to traditional
leaders affected at least a minority of women as well. In the face of social
developments that they saw as threatening to their families women began speaking
in public, circulating petitions, and in other ways practicing active citizenship.
One Rochester woman, after years of trying to deal with the most disadvantaged
people in town through traditional benevolence, decided that charity was never
going to change their—to her—deplorable behavior and proposed that
women should go in a body to the city council demanding a workhouse “where
idle and drunken mothers and fathers must go and work.” She was, more
than she could know, foreshadowing the future. 2
For years historians have argued that rapid economic development and social
change bred a pervasive anxiety and a strong desire on the part of comfortable
citizens to control the behavior of the growing working class. While it is
certainly true that well-established white Protestants often exhibited disdain
for immigrants, black people, and almost anybody different from themselves,
as well as distaste for the life of crowded slums, personal and literary documents
do not support any easy generalization as to what men or women hoped to accomplish
through their voluntary organizations.
The chronology varied considerably from place to place; as the population moved
west women in new settlements tended to recapitulate the history of earlier
communities in compressed form, combining older forms of activity with the
new. In Cleveland, for example, the Female Charitable Society and the Female
Moral Reform Society appeared simultaneously in 1837 when the town had barely
two thousand inhabitants. Nearly two decades later San Francisco women, as
we saw in the first chapter, combined practices developed in Boston and New
York half a century before and adapted them to the peculiar needs of a gold
rush city. While women in the longer-settled areas were developing new forms
of organization, benevolent societies continued to appear on the frontier.
By the 1830s change was visible in many places as women’s moral reform,
temperance, and antislavery societies took shape, and women factors’ workers
organized short-lived but vigorous efforts to improve their wages and conditions
of labor. Here and there, middle-class women also took up the cause of working
women’s poor wages and difficulty in finding work. Black women, in a
context of discrimination and deprivation, strove urgently to help themselves.
All these groups had in common the desire to change behavior. There was considerable
crossover in membership among organizations, nearly all had a high degree of
religious commitment, and most encountered a greater or lesser degree of community
opposition. Few escaped a degree of internal conflict.
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Excerpted from Natural Allies by Anne Firor Scott. 1992, University of Illinois Press. pp. 37-38.
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