Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834–1854 by Lisa J. Shaver (review)

Reforming Women examines the first two decades of activism by the American Female Guardian Society (AFGS), a social reform organization that emerged out of the Second Great Awakening and whose goal was the eradication of prostitution. As Lisa J. Shaver demonstrates, the larger aims of moral reform organizations like the AFGS were even more ambitious: the women of the AFGS set their sights on the "double standards" shaping disparate views of men's and women's sexual identities, to the disadvantage of the latter. Moral reform, in Shaver's view, aided in "the development of a distinct women's rhetoric and an early feminist consciousness" (12). That this activism has largely faded from historical view even as contemporary movements like abolition, temperance, and women's suffrage have not, speaks to ongoing conflicts embedded in activism taken on behalf of others.

For the full century of its existence, the AFGS published the Advocate, an organizational newspaper which tirelessly proselytized on behalf of female prostitutes and, more broadly, America's "fallen women." Shaver argues for undoing the historical disregard that befell moral reform and organizations like the AFGS, noting throughout that many of the names supporting moral reform also signed on to better-known movements. Combining solid research with persuasive prose and an appealing regard for her subject matter, Shaver illuminates how early nineteenth-century women organized in the face of opposition while pursuing a very unpopular cause against "rampant licentiousness" (97). More particularly, she shows that their newspaper the Advocate helped carve out space for women in the periodical press. The Advocate was a proudly female production; women wrote the newspaper's articles, edited its contents, and were its target audience.

Other scholars, primarily in history and literary studies, have examined moral reform, the AFGS, and the Advocate, typically in the context of documenting prostitution or its nineteenth-century representation. Shaver's contribution to this admittedly small vein of scholarship on the AFGS begins with her disciplinary focus. As a rhetorician, she approaches the group and its writings through the lens of their impact on both author and reader, focusing upon their "tactics." She documents the reformers' conveyance of "righteous anger," an emotional pitch perfectly calibrated for an antebellum readership eager for social change. In the study's final chapters she describes an "ethos of presence" performed by AFGS members, which neatly matches their evangelical beliefs to a ministering practice in their communities.

The book's final chapters contain Shaver's strongest contribution to ongoing scholarship on moral reform organizations like the AFGS and the ways in which women benefitted from them, both as activists and as the object of their endeavors. A chapter devoted to Margaret Prior, the first "city missionary" hired by the group, exemplifies how she and her peers understood that "ethos of presence" as encompassing both the "situated ethos" of Prior's visits to New York City's poorest neighborhoods and the "invented ethos" of Prior's self-representation in her Advocate reports. Prior epitomizes the type of woman attracted to moral reform: a white, middle-class, evangelical Protestant, Prior came to the AFGS after an education in New York-area benevolence work. In her reports and in the posthumous memoir penned by an AFGS admirer, Prior's experience and faith are depicted as enabling her to face down angry and unwelcoming members of the community an adulterous husband in one instance, an angry shopkeeper in another. Engaged in what she called "walks of usefulness," the missionary intervenes where she is needed, even if not always wanted. Taunted by "fashionable young ladies" in one report, Prior responds that "the Lord makes it my business to care for the souls of my fellow-beings" (81). Subsequent chapters examine the society's auxiliary groups and the establishment of their "Home for the Friendless" (an early...