This dissertation reassesses the relationship between the ideology of women's moral superiority and a broad spectrum of benevolent work performed by white Northeastern women from approximately 1820 through 1885. The rhetoric of "benevolent femininity" obscured many facets of women's labor: payment and receipt of wages, access to corporate status, and involvement in the political process, for example. I argue that both the interplay of gender and class ideologies and the definition of radical and conservative positions are contextual. Thus the growing importance of the vote in effecting social change during this period, more than women's "expanded" sense of their own rights, provoked the demand for suffrage, and transformed the very nature of benevolence.

Chapter One establishes the ideological framework in which the work of female benevolence took place, as well as the uses to which women and men put the ideology of women's moral uniqueness in limiting more radical activity. A broad spectrum of the actual "business of benevolence" is the focus of Chapter Two. Chapter Three assesses the ideological separation of morality and politics in light of evidence that women participated in varied and extensive political activities and that a "non-voting" position constituted a more radical stance in the 1830s and 40s. Chapter Four discusses the impact on two generations of women of the growing dependence on electoral and institutional settings for benevolent work in the 1850s. The Civil War relief work of the younger generation, many of whom celebrated explicitly business virtues and undermined the traditional conflation of benevolence and women, is discussed in Chapter Five. By the postwar period, with its emphasis on "scientific" charity and secular reform, the ideology of benevolent femininity had lost its potential to achieve real social change. That transition is discussed in Chapter Six. An Afterward focuses on the persistent use of the ideology of morally-expressed gender difference.