Sister societies

"Many nineteenth-century women got their first taste of political activism in small-town societies advocating temperance and other moral causes. Alongside national organizations with charismatic male leaders, these grassroots efforts by ordinary women helped to bring about social reform, change the meaning of political action and, in the process, redefine gender roles. Significantly, women moved from behind-the-scenes moral suasion into the political arena at a time when the question of slavery in the United States was developing from a humanitarian concern into a hotly contested partisan…