Christine Stansell

Excerpted as "The Geography of Vice" in Gary Kornblith, ed., The Industrial Revolution in America (1998)

In her study of female reformers in New York City during the first half of the 19th Century, Stansell demonstrates that class loyalties were stronger than gender loyalties for the women who reached out to the City's poor. Female reformers were middle class first and women second. Though they empathized with poor women as mothers, their reform efforts did little to meet the poor women they ministered to on these women's own terms. The objective of their efforts always remained converting the poor to middle class values, which at times seemed superfluous and at others (to our late 20th Century sensibilities) bordered on malevolence.

Second Great Awakening witnessed heightened religious fervor and missionary zeal directed at the working poor of New York City. Emerging separate women's sphere of domesticity colors, and is colored by, encounters between middle class reformers and the working poor in this period. Not only do the reformers see the urban poor through the lens of domesticity, but the lens of domesticity is also shaped by these encounters. The stark relief of true womanhood is highlighted by their encounter with "the other," urban poor women whose working class behavior cast them as "unworthy".

Neither the fallen Eve nor the frivolous rich aristocratic woman, the evangelical woman was a moral exemplar to man and woman alike. The New York Tract Society sent messengers out to the urban poor. Women who went forth with tracts and bibles were exemplars of "republican womanhood." So culturally powerful was this gendered construction of female redeemers, by 1834 The Female Moral Reform Society was founded to abolish prostitution. Under the cloak of reform, women were empowered to venture into territory reserved for "respectable" men.

Sentimental images of victimized womanhood underlay the categories of worthy/unworthy women. When a nine month pregnant woman showed up on the doorstep of the Asylum for Lying in Women, they were sent back out in the night and delivered her baby in a freezing cold garret -- all for lack of "reliable" references proving that the child was legitimate. The next day the references arrived and the woman and her child were given shelter. Mother and baby survived, but the story could have turned out else wise.

What did the republican woman find when she entered this exotic terrain of the urban poor? She found a mode of womanhood that was alien, even unintelligible. "The ways laboring women helped one another, raised their children, played out their pleasures and grievances on the streets only seemed to the pious to manifest a belligerent iniquity." (p. 119) The women who were worthy of the reformers' help, on the other hand, cut themselves off from their working class communities. To merit the attentions of the reformer women, the poor woman needed to forsake the "gregarious clamor of the tenement" for the solitude of the garret. Because most women did not choose to separate themselves from their communities in this manner, class antagonisms disqualified them for the assistance of the reformers.

Ultimately class loyalties prevailed and the cult of true womanhood was reinforced by these encounters with the exotic world of the tenements.… (mehr)