Moral Reform Movement

The moral reform movement was a collective effort by ill-equipped parents, “settlement workers and vice reformers joined with club leaders, probation officers, social workers, and sex educators” to combat the scourge of prostitution and to bring under control the newly sexualized population of young working women in the 1900’s (Alexander, 1995, p. 41). Once the young women got a taste of freedom, they “profess utter lack of respect for their parents and contempt for their home life” and “habitually have immoral relations with boys and men without expecting or accepting financial reward or gain” though “some of them are already willing and anxious to begin a life of professional immorality” (Alexander, 1995, p. 40). Prior to this new sexualization …show more content…
51). Cornelia Green and her associates separated themselves from the Benevolent Society because they believed that the “girl problem” needed to be approached in a different way, they wanted to be more vocal about the problem and its origins. To the Moral Reform Society prostitution wasn’t the only problem, working girls were also at risk. The society’s attitude about how to approach the problem was “considerably more confrontational” than previous societies (Boylan, 2002, 45). They started their own newspaper, the Advocate of Moral Reform, with the hopes for reaching more people with their message. Some topics of the articles in the paper include article with “strong stances” on “opposition to slavery and advocacy of expanded rights for women” (Boylan, 2002, 45). The majority of the content in the newspaper was written by women leaders and as well as self-published by the society. The philosophy of the society’s newspaper was that they believed in “doing and saying too, and that while some good may result from doing, the great good must result from saying” (Boylan, 2002, 144). The newspaper circulated “twenty thousand copies” to readers in “several states” (Boylan, 2002, 144). This allowed for their views to influence other people and organizations across New …show more content…
One Sunday morning in 1835, March to be exact, a group from the Moral reform Society entered into a brothel in the Five Points slum of New York. Once inside and with an audience of “all but the keeper of the house were willing to converse,” both the prostitutes and their clients. “The missionaries attempted to read aloud form the Bible and pray” and “chastised the inhabitants and clients for their wickedness” in hopes to “persuade them to abandon their lives of sin” (Severson, 2014, p.