Women's Voluntary Associations

The history of women's voluntary associations begins during the Revolutionary period, when everyday domestic pursuits became politicized as defiant opposition to mercantilist policies imposed on the North American colonists by the British Empire. Groups of women called Daughters of Liberty met, usually in ministers' homes, to produce homespun in order to sustain economic boycotts of British goods. The urgent need to outfit General George Washington's army during the Revolutionary War (1775–1783) further eroded customary barriers to the movement of women in public spaces; ladies' associations collected donations for the Revolutionary cause by going door-to-door.

Voluntary associations were few in number and short-lived until the confluence of two ideologies, republicanism and evangelical Christianity, altered women's relationships to family and community. Women had no political status, but their claims to moral authority from active participation in churches and religious movements were imbued with new meanings in the new nation. Improvements in women's education occurred in the nascent Republic of the 1780s and 1790s as reformers used the rhetoric of republicanism and assumptions about women's moral authority to argue that they, as men, must be prepared to assume civic duties. Although women were not schooled to enter public life but to oversee the spiritual training of their sons in order to ensure a virtuous citizenry, education nevertheless raised women's expectations for having a public role in the new nation. Many of the first generation of leaders of early-nineteenth-century benevolent societies had attended female seminaries.

In the first third of the nineteenth century, benevolent societies founded by middle-class northern and southern white women and free black women proliferated to serve the indigent in rapidly growing towns and communities. Many benevolent societies, initially organized as auxiliaries to churches to provide crucial financial support to local clergy and religious missions, became an indispensable apparatus of social welfare, especially for widows and orphans. Isolated by racism, African American women organized for mutual spiritual, intellectual, and material benefit in groups such as the Colored Female Religious and Moral Society founded in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1818, but these organizations also provided charity to those in their communities living in dire poverty. Associations of white women acted as the guardians for the most vulnerable members of the community. Along the Eastern seaboard, benevolent societies cooperated to establish orphan asylums and schools.

The spiritual fervor of the Second Great Awakening in the 1820s and 1830s, with its emphasis on conversion and combating sin, transformed female benevolence into a broader movement for moral and social reform. While many associations remained committed to good works though local charity, some women banded together in public crusades against alcohol abuse and prostitution. Collective efforts for reform included types of public activism previously pursued only by men, including petition drives, rallies and conventions, public lectures, and published broadsides. The New York Female Reform Society, founded in 1834 to reform prostitutes and discourage their clients in New York City, published a newsletter and empowered its members to visit brothels. Susan B. Anthony's first introduction to politics was through her involvement in a local chapter of the Daughters of Temperance in central New York during the 1840s. And as her long career in public life as a leader of the suffrage movement demonstrates, the early women's rights movement in the mid-nineteenth century owed its beginnings to female associations in the new nation.

See alsoBenevolent Associations; Orphans and Orphanages; Prostitutes and Prostitution; Revolution: Women's Participation in the Revolution; Temperance and Temperance Movement; Welfare and Charity .

bibliography

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Kathleen A. Laughlin