“A Field White for the Harvest”: Race, Gender, and Moral Reform in the Antebellum North

Le résumé fourni par la source

Among the most common cultural encounters of the Civil War era were those instigated by white, middle-class, female moral reformers. By entering poor, immigrant, and Black neighborhoods, these reformers had regular contact with people and environments that they identified as non-white, leading them to manifest their whiteness in highly salient ways. Drawing on the diaries and memoirs of white female reformers and on records of the New York City Tract Society and other organizations, this essay explores the racial, gendered and interpersonal dynamics of the reform encounter, revealing it as an important locus of middle-class white women’s identity construction. Not only did reform projects allow white women to deploy their moral authority in a manner that affirmed their racial privilege, but their work also established a forum for their distinctively white and distinctively female contributions to the republic. As arbiters of communal moral standards, middle-class white female reformers put their racial identities in service to the republic, thereby—according to the standards of the day—demonstrating civic as well as moral virtue. As a result, moral reform campaigns established a crucial nexus through which white women could exchange their moral currency for the kind of political currency that carried value in the republic and challenged the assumption that middle-class white women were too dependent to contribute to the common good.

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