The Second Great
Awakening and
Women’s Activism

From the 1790s through the 1830s, a religious movement known as the Second Great Awakening swept through communities across the United States. Revivals and camp meetings transformed many denominations, and evangelical Protestant churches were especially affected by this religious fervor, which not only altered the nature of church services but also led to a surge in church membership. In Documents 11.6 and 11.7, evangelist Charles Grandison Finney and the English traveler Frances Trollope describe the character of revivals in quite different terms.

The Second Great Awakening’s social impact extended beyond church membership, and many of the newly converted sought to put their religious beliefs into action through good works. Especially in the North, this meant joining movements designed to rid American society of what they believed were the consequences of sin. Temperance societies, charitable organizations, antiprostitution campaigns, and the abolitionist movement all benefited from this commitment to social reform.

Women formed the backbone of the Second Great Awakening, bringing their husbands, sons, and brothers to mass meetings. It was natural, then, that they also sought to extend their beliefs into reform activities. As women slowly took on a more public role in reform efforts, their actions generated passionate and heated debates over the proper place for women in American society. Several of the documents that follow explore these debates through the lens of the abolitionist movement. Document 11.9, the pastoral letter from Congregationalist ministers, is an example of the criticism directed at women when they engaged in public antislavery work. The female abolitionists in Documents 11.8 and 11.10 defend themselves by appealing to religious doctrines and also the principles of American democracy. Women’s reform impulse eventually led some to argue for an expansion of women’s rights. While small numbers of abolitionist, temperance, and moral reform activists initiated the women’s rights movement of the mid-nineteenth century, many of them came from Quaker and Unitarian rather than evangelical backgrounds.