Women in Antebellum Reform

Lori D. Ginzberg is Associate Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States, which was co-winner of the 1991 National Historical Society’s Book Prize in American History. She has written numerous articles on nineteenth-century women’s political and intellectual history, including “’Pernicious Heresies’: Women’s Political Identities and Sexual Respectability in the Nineteenth Century,”  in Alison Parker and Stephanie Cole, eds., Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America, and “’The Hearts of Your Readers will Shudder’: Fanny Wright, Infidelity, and American Freethought,” American Quarterly 46, which won the Constance Rourke prize. In 1995-96 she was a Fulbright senior teaching fellow at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem. Lori Ginzberg lives in Philadelphia.

• Foreword vPreface ixChapter One. The Roots of Reform 1A Changing Society 3A Woman’s Sphere 8Chapter Two. Charity and the Relations of Class 15The Worthy Poor 16Female Benevolence 18Organizing the Work 22Helping One’s Own 29Chapter Three. Drink, Sex, Crime, and Insanity 33Temperance 33Moral Reform 39Prison Reform 44The Care of the Insane 48Buildings and Ballots 51Chapter Four. Antislavery 57The Origins of Antislavery 60The Moral Problem of Slavery 64Antislavery Efforts 70Response from the Opposition 74Life as an Abolitionist 81Chapter Five. Woman’s Rights 90Roads Not Taken 91Reformers and the Woman Question 97The Declaration of Sentiments 105The Birth of the Woman’s Rights Movement 110Conclusion 118Bibliographical Essay 122Index 137Illustrations and Photographs follow page 80