| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

"The First of Causes to Our Sex": The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834–1848. By Daniel S. Wright. (New York: Routledge, 2006. xii, 278 pp. $75.00, ISBN 978-0-415-97910-8.)

This book is an important addition to the historiography of antebellum reform. Building on the scholarship of Anne M. Boylan, Lori Ginzburg, and other noted historians, Daniel S. Wright discusses the feminization of moral reform during its heyday, the 1830s and 1840s. He persuasively argues that the movement's greatest strength was in rural not urban areas. There were over six hundred rural auxiliary societies with approximately forty-five thousand members, concentrated in New England, New York, and Ohio (p. 2). Wright utilizes a wide range of sources, including church membership and tax lists, censuses, and petitions, to compile a database of rural female moral reformers. They tended to be Yankee Congregationalists from moderately prosperous families who had significantly fewer children than other women in their communities.

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