“Serpents,” “Fiends,” and “Libertines”: Inscribing an Evangelical Rhetoric of Rage in the Advocate of Moral Reform

Abstract

The following essay delineates an “evangelical rhetoric of rage” used by antebellum female moral reformers in their campaign against licentiousness. Highlighting their assertion of moral authority, their use of scripture to justify actions, their confrontational tone, their candid, unapologetic discussions of sexual immorality, and their creation of a public forum for women, this essay claims that female moral reformers represent an important turning point in women's rhetoric. While moral reform has garnered less attention than abolition or temperance, female moral reformers forged an early feminist consciousness and employed methods and messages women reformers would use throughout the nineteenth century.

Notes

¹In 1839 the New York Female Moral Reform Society changed its name to American Female Moral Reform Society to better reflect the national reach of the organization. Throughout this article I refer this organization as the FMRS.

²I thank Rhetoric Review peer reviewers C. Jan Swearingen and Nan Johnson for their valuable suggestions.

³Although auxiliary societies were concentrated in New York, Boston, and New England, they extended west as far as Michigan and south as far as Alabama (Whitetaker 124).