formed the backbone of the Anglo-American reform movement, certainly of the antislavery movement. They passed petitions, raised money, sold newspaper subscriptions, and distributed literature. Yet many aspects of female participation remain unclear. For example, it is believed that the majority of these women were single, although no broadly based study exists to support the theory. It seems logical to assume however, as does one pioneer study, that spinsters would have had the time and the energy to engage in such work; they may have felt the need for a socially useful vocation; they would have experienced a greater impetus than married women to work outside the home; and they would have had fewer encumbrances in the way of domestic responsibilities and social constraints in so working.[1] Yet the letters, diaries, and memoirs of single women reformers do not fully substantiate this theory. The actual reform activity of women, whether married or unmarried, was a more complex intellectual, social, political, psychological, and economic process. It is my belief that the nineteenth-century spinster shared many of the ideological, familial, and domestic encumbrances of her married sister. She was not substantially more free to make a full-time commitment to reform. The prescriptive literature of early nineteenthcentury Anglo-American culture clearly defined those qualities thought most desirable in women. A true woman was delicate of body, pure of mind, devoted to religion and the home, compassionate, selfless, nurturing, and submissive. In a world increasingly dominated by the qualities of materialism, competition, a d individualism, women-ensconced in their refuge-like homes-embodied the old virtues of love, spirituality, selflessness, harmony, and service. The fe ale was believed to have a specific social role and a vocation of significance, as both religion and patriotism demanded of women that they marry and aise children. By their example, and through their teaching, early Victorian mothers formed goodly and godly future citizens.[2] Single female reformers, like other mid-century Anglo-American women, acknowledged the prescriptions of this ideology. They felt the deviancy of their unmarried state, and often reacted by emphasizing the feminin qualities in their personalities and behavior in ways which limited their contributions to the cause of reform. Single women were particularly sensitive to public attitudes regarding the unnaturalness of their spinsterhood. Sarah Pugh, a Philadelphia abolitionist, still exhibited this sensitivity at the age of sixtyseven in writing about the upcoming marriages of two young female friends: well this is the way of the world, save in exceptional cases.[3] And Florence Nightingale, the British hospital reformer, wrote that all must make Sappho's leap in one way or another, some to death and to marriage and again to a new life even in this world. Which of them is the better part, God only knows. Popular prejudice gives it in favour of marriage. . . .[4] Perhaps because they lacked the usual accouterments of womanhood-husband and children -spinsters felt their subjection to other measurements