19th Century Moral Reform: The Rise of the Outcast

The nineteenth century was a time of immense change in the United States. As immigration into the country increased exponentially and a new wave of religious fervor gripped the nation, new social characters began to emerge and resistance to all these changes began to permeate the minds, streets, and even laws of society. As print developed into the new mass medium of the people, sensationalism was born along with widespread panic. It is fitting, then, that in the nineteenth century, mass moral reform movements first took hold in the country. As the most historical and integrated institutions of society (such as slavery and marriage) began to be questioned and even began to crumble, Americans flew into a panic. People decided to rally against the things they felt were destroying the values of Americans: alcoholism, prostitution, abortion, slavery, and other things – all associated inextricably with the lower class, despite the obvious fallacy of that belief. Moral reform in the nineteenth century was fueled by the rise of power and integration into society of the American outcast – be it a slave, an immigrant, or especially a woman.

The importance of race and class in the moral reform movement simply cannot be underestimated. In the highly nativist views of nineteenth-century Americans (particularly middle-to-upper class), immigrants were the enemy – threatening not only racially, economically, and politically, but morally as well.# Everything from gambling to alcoholism to obscenity and prostitution were seen as products of the lower class, which was mostly filled with immigrants. Millions of hopeful immigrants, dreaming of paved gold streets and endless possibilities, poured into America in the nineteenth century only to be thrust immediately into the burgeoning lower-class of other foreigners. Forced out of good employment and into poverty by discriminatory beliefs, immigrants had no choice but to inhabit slums and tenements, usually in major cities like New York. The exponential growth of these cities, and the problems that sprang thereof, all became indelibly associated with these areas and the people that inhabited them. Reformers began to target immigrants, and used their association with sexuality, vice, and the lower class towards their purposes. The root of the temperance movement, for example, was deeply interwoven into association with the lower class and, most importantly, the poor immigrants that all but made up that class. Temperance is the practice of moderation in all things, especially alcohol. Alcoholism was blamed for mental illness, poverty, and crime – all associated with immigrants and urban life.# The gigantic metropolises that these immigrants lived in soon became symbols of crime, sexuality, and vice.

This is, in part, due to the emergence of the penny press as a pervasive mass medium. In the earlier nineteenth century, the mass print media available was accessible only to people in the middle to upper class, in the trend of prescriptive literature. Mass reading in all classes began to gain popularity, however, as religious and reform-minded groups sent propaganda-laden literature and tracts, usually for free, to a huge amount of American people, rejecting the idea that only the financially capable should be able to read.# It wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century, however, that the penny press became the most widely-read (and most infamous) mass medium. Universally accessible both financially and culturally, the penny press provided sensationalist local news to newly urbanized populations. Along with creating a sense of community among their huge readerships, these papers tapped into the prevalent fears and curiosities of nineteenth-century Americans. Much like the news stories of today, penny papers focused overwhelmingly on crime and vice in the city, giving a sense that danger and evil lurked around every corner. These penny papers indirectly (although perhaps not inadvertently set many a reform movement in action.

Another major part of reform is women – whether the cause of it, the supporters of it, or those benefiting from it. Consider the major reform movements of the nineteenth century. Abolitionism dealt with the intrinsic unfairness of enslaving a person in a country where every man is supposedly created equal. Slavery exposed a hideous discrepancy and therefore Americans finally moved to eradicate it. The fact that women were still not given rights as slavery was abolished exposed only more incongruity within the Nation’s basic structure. Thus, the women’s movement grew directly out of abolitionism.

Accordingly, women saw temperance (and later, prohibition) as a way to eliminate the decay caused by alcoholism in a family. Women living in an urban area experienced firsthand the poverty so often inflicted by an alcoholic breadwinner. Women living in an insolated rural home were forced to endure the constant terror of living with an unpredictable and possibly violent addict without any hope of being observed and rescued.# To women, temperance seemed like the perfect solution, and thus, they were able to unite in support of the movement.# Through involvement in the newly politicized arena of moral reform, they also took one more step into the public sphere of political causes and activity.

Temperance wasn’t the only moral reform movement that enabled women to step out in public. Whether lobbying against prostitution, abortion, alcoholism, or slavery, women had inadvertently created an effective niche for themselves in the formerly exclusive male public world. Apart from moral reform, women were also stepping out of the private female sphere of the home into the new world of the working class woman. In this new world, women developed their lives in response to the regulations and controls of officials, in an environment much more suited to anonymity and freedom#. Of course, women’s new place did not go unchallenged. In 1848, famous abolitionists and women’s rights advocates Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott fashioned a new Declaration of Independence, called the Declaration of Sentiments, to include all men and women. The Mechanic’s Advocate, a men’s magazine, promptly published a response to the declaration, calling it a “parody,” and denouncing the women who “attend these meetings [Women’s Rights conventions], no doubt at the expense of their more appropriate dutiesâÂ?¦”# This response illuminates one of the most incendiary aspects of the moral reform movements of the nineteenth century: not a battle of the sexes per se, but an undeniable emphasis on women’s sexuality and their “place” in society.

One of the most notable of these reforms is the anti-abortion movement. As abortion grew in visibility, profitability, and practice, Americans apparently began to question the ethics of abortion as an act within itself, rather than a product of a “greater” sin, nonprocreative sexual activity. However, it is certainly arguable that ethics, in terms of whether a fetus is technically alive, did not have much to do with most reformers’ concerns involving abortion. The practice, most common in urban areas and, of course, associated with the lower class, had now become more than embarrassment control. Women were using abortion as family control. It became frighteningly and undeniably apparent to Americans that lower-class immigrants and prostitutes were not the only women getting abortions. The infamous Madame Restell, who provided abortions and contraceptives to countless New York women, had a home that Nicola Beisel describes as “only the most visible manifestation of a practice that saved individual families from social disgrace but representedâÂ?¦the destruction of the familyâÂ?¦by its existence showed that the sexual purity of respectable women was hardly incorruptible.”# Additionally, the growing availability and safety of abortion along with the unprecedented freedom and anonymity of the new urban working-class female allowed women a freedom they had never had before: the freedom to make their own choices regarding their families and their fertility. This signified a great change in the complicated socio-sexual structure of American life. In a country dominated by white upper-class males, the idea that women held any power whatsoever was truly frightening.

The story of Mary Rogers is an interesting case study of the events that often lead to reform. Found dead in the Hudson River in 1841, the young and beautiful Mary became a veritable icon of the new American world. We can connect the events and circumstances of Mary’s short life to nearly all of the deepest fears of Americans in the nineteenth century. “Defined by her sexuality and her apparently violent death,”# Mary was a member of the threatening working female class, became a victim of the dangerous urban city, was ravenously sexualized and analyzed by the penny press, and was later considered to be the victim of a botched abortion. While reformers used Mary’s highly sensationalized story as a vehicle to further their purposes, Mary signifies so much more. Her story took place at the precise historical moment in which the tides began to drastically turn in America, and thus her death symbolizes the death of an era. Her death indirectly sparked interest and movement in police reform, immigration control, and new legislation that strove to restore order to the gigantic new metropolis that was New York City.# It is also significant that Mary’s story was documented so closely in the penny papers of New York. As America expanded economically and yet became more repressed in matters of sexuality and social life, Mary’s tragedy and the countless stories that evolved from it became an acceptably eroticized story of the city along with a cautionary tale in which “issues of race intertwine with visions of sex, violence, and urban chaosâÂ?¦”# Mary, like the other immigrants and women who caused or enacted reform, also symbolized the rise in power and importance of the American outcast. That the death of a poor and rather unimportant young woman could cause, however indirectly, such a stunning chain reaction of both political and social events (particularly reform movements), is an irrefutable testament to the rapidly intensifying influence and significance of these cultural pariahs.

While most historians directly connect immigrant, slaves, or women to reform, few have expressed the combined power of these people. Americans in the nineteenth century certainly felt the proverbial earth moving beneath their feet, as the basic pillars of their society were called into question and destroyed. Ironically, the moral reform movements most often enacted to prevent change were frequently the instigators of that very change, or at least signified its coming. In a country paralyzed by nonsensical incongruities in its own constitution, it is the rise of the outcasts that shook the country out of its hypocritical stupor. Freed slaves, for example, certainly as intelligent and worthy as (if not more so than) their oppressors, spoke out with the help of many people (including women) and slavery was finally abolished. With this momentous event, a new people was introduced (if not yet integrated) into our society, and a new group of illustrious and important individuals became an indelible part of our country’s history. Accordingly, immigrants were forced to stagnate in poverty not due to lack of ability or desire, but due to discrimination. As their visibility and importance grew, this became apparent, and humanitarian reform was born, along with the slow but steady intertwining of the classes. Women were perhaps the most effective instigators of reform, and probably those who benefited most from it. Trapped in the restrictive confines of the private female sphere, women were invaluable and yet their true potential was not yet unlocked. It was the sexuality of women that spurred many a reform movement and the voices of women that kept them going strong. It is a substantial understatement to say that women played a central role in the moral reform explosion of the nineteenth century, and their involvement marks the moment in history where women and the other outcasts of American society finally began to get their due.