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It is not much of an exaggeration to say that women made revivalistic Protestantism happen in the nineteenth century. For example, as historian Mary Ryan has shown, Charles Finney's New York revival meetings were organized, prepared, and prayed for by an extensive network of Christian women. Moreover, these women often brought the men in their lives—husbands, fathers, sons, and more distant relatives—to Finney's meetings.

Women's influence soon reached far beyond the prayer meeting and the revival, especially through their participation in social causes. It was in the crusades for educational reform, abolition, and temperance that three of nineteenth-century America's most prominent Christian women made their names and changed their nation: Catharine Beecher, Sojourner Truth, and Frances Willard.

The oldest of eight surviving children of the influential Connecticut minister and social reformer Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) and his wife, Roxana, Catharine Esther Beecher was trained from girlhood in the custodianship of her nation. At 16, her mother died and she took on the mothering role for her younger siblings—a training ground for her later influence as a founder of schools and trainer of teachers.

A woman described by one historian as "plain of appearance, with heavy features, dark hair worn in lank ringlets, and a sallow complexion," Beecher was frail, suffering "recurrent nervous collapses and attacks of sciatica," which slowed but never stopped her indefatigable reforming efforts. But she had no time for the "weaker sex" philosophy that assumed women were less capable of learning and leading than men.

Catharine saw America's female seminaries (quasi-colleges or academies focusing on subjects considered appropriate for women) as neglecting both physical education and the practical skills necessary to the middle-class Victorian woman who managed a complex household and provided the physical and moral care for the next generation.

In response, Catharine, herself a schoolteacher from early age, founded several schools for women.

The success of these schools was uneven, but Beecher placed her stamp on women's education and the arts of home management. Her widely read books, Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), Domestic Receipt Book (1846), and American Woman's Home (1869), penned with sister Harriet, launched home economics as a respected science.

Even more significant, Catharine picked up her father's crusade to "Christianize" the West—through education. (At odds with her father's stern Calvinism, she eventually transferred her membership from a Congregational to the Episcopal Church.) In the 1840s, she began traveling and writing energetically in the urgent cause of sending women teachers to the frontier.

Her Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845) caught the attention of, among others, the ex-governor of Vermont, William Slade, who founded the Board of National Popular Education.

With Beecher as head recruiter and trainer, the Board sent more than 500 schoolteachers westward from New England. After Beecher divided the Board over disagreements, she continued the crusade through her American Woman's Educational Association.

During the decades before her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, and her brother Henry Ward Beecher began his Civil War-era rise to pulpit stardom, Catharine was America's most renowned Beecher.

Sojourner Truth's deep-toned speech, marked by a Dutch accent absorbed during her youth as a slave in Ulster County, N.Y., challenged and captivated anti-slavery audiences across the country. Truth was born Isabella, and in her early years took the name Van Wagener in honor of a family that helped her escape slavery in 1827, one year before emancipation was declared in New York State.

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