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 ...

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