Reforming Women

Abstract

Claudia L. Bushman. "A Good Poor Man's Wife": Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Century New England. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1981. 276 + xvi pp. Mark Thomas Connelly. The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980.261 + x pp. Barbara Leslie Epstein. The Politics of Domesticity : Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth Century America. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.188 + xi pp. Estelle B. Freedman. Their Sisters' Keepers-. Women's Prison Reform in America, 1830-1930. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1981. 248 pp. These four volumes present useful new material on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American reform crusaders and their reforms concerning women. Connelly's book describes a general social movement, antiprostitution; the other three authors explore women's part in reform movements and begin two centuries earlier. Included are prisons for women, religion and temperance as vehicles for protofeminism, and the activism of a pioneer suffragist and club woman. All the books describe issues which concerned the "middling" classes.