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 brought about social reform, changed the meaning of political action, and, in the process, redefined 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 issue....

Offers insight on the origins and evolution of women's activism in the United States by examining more than 200 exclusively female antislavery societies that persisted from the 1820s through the Civil War.