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O n a Sunday mOrning in march 1835, a small group of evan- gelical missionaries entered a brothel in New York city's notorious slum, the Five Points. Their intention: to chastise the inhabitants and clients for their wickedness and persuade them to abandon their lives of sin. For the New York Female Moral Reform Society missionaries, brothel visits were part of a strategy to eliminate sexual immorality from society. Members viewed prostitutes as hapless victims of male license and of a cruel double standard-both of which they railed against-and they aimed to rescue women from lives of perceived degradation. Missionaries met with a vari- ety of responses to their efforts, ranging from open reception to threats of violence. On this particular Sunday, all but the keeper of the house were willing to converse. As the missionaries attempted to read aloud from the Bible and pray, they later reported that the madam of the house "kept about her work, washing dishes, and making an almost deafening noise . . . scraping an old platter with a huge knife."2
This excerpt is valuable in two ways. First, it hints toward the environment of a certain class of American antebellum brothel, in which domestic activi- ties were not far removed from the entertainment of guests. Second, and more importantly, it illustrates some of the tensions inherent in the contact between missionaries and those they sought to reform. Such descriptions are a part of the missionary reports in the Advocate of Moral Reform, the main publication of the New York Female Moral Reform Society (FMRS). The Advocate, which had 16,500 subscribers by 1838, was one of the most widely read evangelical papers in the countr y.3 By printing lurid tales of seduction and abandonment, the society intended to shock the public with the prevalence of vice in their midst and impress upon them the plight of exploited women. The society's reform strategy, as articulated in the Advocate, was twofold: prevention of immorality through education and the reclamation of those already "abandoned." Whereas reclamation involved the rescue of prostitutes from brothels, prevention efforts included stressing the importance of proper decorum, particularly to mothers and unmarried young women. The pages of the Advocate are rife with instructions on the raising of...