Daniel S. Wright - The First of Causes to Our Sex: The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834-1848

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International Standard Book Number-10:0-415-97910-2 (Hardcover)

International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97910-8 (Hardcover)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wright, Daniel S.

The first of causes to our sex: the female moral reform movement in the antebellum

Northeast, 1834-1848 / by Daniel S. Wright.

p. cm. -- (Studies in American popular history and culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-415-97910-2 (alk. paper)

1. Women social reformers--United States--History19th century. 2.

Women social reformersNortheastern States--History--19th century. 3.

Rural women--Northeastern States--Political activity--History--19th century.

4. Sexual ethicsUnited States--History--19th century. 5. United StatesMoral

conditions--History19th century. I. Wright, Daniel S. II. Title. III. American popular

history and culture

(Routledge (Firm))

HQ1418.W75 2006

303.4840820974--dc22 2006008010

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In a very real sense this book owes its existence to my great-great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Henry Shedd (18031886)New Hampshire-born and Andover Seminary-trained Ohio minister, abolitionist and temperance man. In every way he was the quintessential Presbygationalist reformer who stands at the center of the northern U. S. burned-over Yankee subculture examined in this study. His stern face and steely eyes still stare out at you from an 1850s daguerreotype. His diary, stored with other relics in an ancient tin chest handed down on my fathers side of the family, details the busy schedule of his antebellum yearsa constant round of preaching, traveling, and attending temperance meetings, antislavery lectures, and the like. As it happens, there was a Female Moral Reform Society in Mt. Gilead, the central Ohio town where he spent much of his career.

When I was mulling over what to do for my Senior Independent Study at the College of Wooster, my father urged that I research Henry Shedd and his sort, the antislavery clergy and churches of Ohio. And so I did, and so began a long-standing fascination with that nexus of antebellum religion and reform so formative of American culture. Years later, when I returned to graduate school seeking to pursue further study in this field, my professor, Kathryn Kish Sklar, suggested the female moral reform movement as a topic in need of further investigation. To make a long story short, this book is the result. In the intervening years, the historiography of religion and reform had been transformed by new lines of inquiry and new kinds of data addressing questions about women, gender, race, and class formation. I am indebted to Profs. Sklar and Thomas Dublin and others in the superb history department of Binghamton University-State University of New York for training me in this new history. This book clearly rests upon the social and womens history of the 1970s-90s, while continuing my earlier interest in the ecclesiastical and religious contexts. But it also attempts to present a new approach to the study of antebellum social movements and a new interpretive framework for one in particular, female moral reform. I could not have completed this study without Profs. Sklar and Dublins on-going guidance, encouragement, and patience through the years it took me to write it in dissertation form.

Many others offered crucial help along the way, not the least of them being my long-suffering wife Margaret. A Dissertation Year Fellowship from the Binghamton University history department enabled me to begin research in earnest. Daniel Scott Smith of the University of Illinois-Chicago generously shared with me his data set of New York State towns. Prof. Lutz Kaelber of Lyndon State College in Vermont introduced me to the mysteries of SPSS at a point when I had moved away from the Binghamton campus. On short notice, the Grafton Town Office made space for me to pore over the town tax records. Amy Brown, wife of the pastor, the Rev. Duane R. Brown, of the Evangelical Congregational Church of Grafton, Massachusetts, dug up membership data from church records for me. Larry Whiteaker, Harold Worthley, Charles Maxfield, John Brooke, and Addie Shields are other scholars who shared important insights and information at various points in my research. I am indebted to the personnel of many libraries and repositories for their helpful service, chief among them the utterly competent staff of the Interlibrary Loan Department of Bartle Library at Binghamton, and also: the American Antiquarian Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, the New Hampshire State Library, the Cheshire County Historical Society, the Congregational Library in Boston, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute, the Hay Library at Brown University, the Feinberg Library Special Collections at SUNY-Plattsburgh, the Boston Public Library, the Rochester Public Library and the state archives of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. I am especially grateful to the American Antiquarian Society, the New Hampshire Historical Society, and the Schlesinger Library for permission to quote from manuscripts in their collections. Garrott Kuzzy, a cartographer in his senior year at Middlebury College in Vermont, performed a final and wonderful service by creating the maps that are included in this book. Whether Henry Shedd would consider what I have written with the help of all these persons (and many more I havent named) a worthy retrospective on his kind of people and his times, I cannot say. But I would affirm that his people were interesting, and his times exciting, and definitely worthy of any effort to understand them better.