Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women's Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797-1840

Abstract

Historians have long recognized the importance of organizations in women's history. From a pioneering 1940 article by Mary Bosworth Treudley, through the work of Eleanor Flexner, to recent works by Nancy F. Cott, Keith E. Melder, and Barbara J. Berg, scholars have outlined the basic pattern of women's organizational beginnings. By 1800 the first permanent women's societies, such as the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in New York, the Boston Female Asylum (founded in 1800), and women's missionary groups had appeared on the urban scene. Members of those societies combined an interest in social meliorism with an emphasis on social deference while also exhibiting concern for the spiritual welfare of those whom they aided. During the 1810s and 1820s, under the influence of the Second Great Awakening, there formed new women's organizations whose members sought first to alleviate spiritual want, then to deal with temporal deprivation. Through Sunday school, tract, Bible, and missionary societies, women labored to convert the objects of their attention as well as to minister to their daily needs. During the late 1820s and 1830s, more actively reformist, even millennialist, women's organizations developed. The New-York and the Boston Female Moral Reform societies worked to reform prostitutes and to eradicate the sexual double standard; female abolitionist societies sought immediate emancipation of slaves; and groups such as the Seamen's Aid Society, Boston, became actively involved in the problems of working women. 1