Northern women in the 1830s were a part of a rising middle class during a period of Protestant religious revival known as the Second Great Awakening. Shaping their place in the emerging middle class, women sought to reform society in order to create an environment where they were valued and respected. Simultaneously, those influenced by the Second Great Awakening were focused on creating a more heavenly America by eradicating immoral practices.Jable, J. Thomas. "Aspects of Moral Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Pennsylvania." The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 102, no. 3 (1978): 344-63. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20091280. Women were able to address both of these goals through the moral reform movement, which marked the first social movement in which women predominated. Moral reform was a female cause that spurred the creation of primarily female organizations. Like most social movements at this time, the movement organized gendered groups. By 1841 there were about 50,000 women in 616 local moral reform societies in the North, including the New England Moral Reform Society. While the two most notable moral reform societies were urban, the auxiliary groups that formed in rural areas did an immense amount of work for the movement and consisted of a large majority of the women in the movement.Daniel Wright, The First Causes to Our Sex: The Female Moral Reform Movement in the Antebellum Northeast, 1834-1848, (New York and London: Routledge, 2006).
