The Daring 19th-Century Reformers Who Sought to End Prostitution by Offering Financial and Emotional Support to Urban Sex Workers

Led entirely by women, the American Female Moral Reform Society gave material aid to those in need and pushed for men to be held accountable for frequenting brothels

Jenna Deep

March 27, 2025

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Margaret Prior was walking through the streets of New York City when a teenager holding a slip of paper asked for her help in finding an address. Glancing over the note, the American missionary agreed to direct the stranger to the house in question. Prior soon learned that a job agency had sent the teenager, who couldn’t read, to seek employment at the house as a chambermaid. Upon arriving at the address, however, Prior was horrified to discover not a respectable dwelling, but rather a brothel. The girl was likewise shocked, saying “that no price would induce her to return, as she preferred a virtuous life to great riches,” according to Walks of Usefulness, or, Reminiscences of Mrs. Margaret Prior.

As a member of the American Female Moral Reform Society (AFMRS), a group dedicated to preventing prostitution in cities in the early and mid-19th century, Prior was uniquely equipped to help women and girls like the one she’d just met. By visiting lower-class neighborhoods and adopting a compassionate approach to reform, Prior and her colleagues at the AFMRS demonstrated that they were a valuable resource for sex workers hoping to leave the industry, as well as those in need more generally.

After leaving the brothel, Prior offered to connect the teenager to a reputable employer, and the girl readily accepted. Prior then paid a visit to the man who’d sent the girl to the house, asking if he knew exactly what he’d done. The man pleaded his innocence, saying he hadn’t realized the property’s true purpose, although he admitted that the woman who owned the house only wanted him to send girls who were “good-looking.” Prior later reconnected with the teenager she’d helped, who was by then employed as a servant and had learned how to read. “She ceases not to express her gratitude to Mrs. P for the trouble and anxiety she manifested [on] her behalf, and by which alone she was rescued,” a fellow moral reformer recalled in Walks of Usefulness.

What was the American Female Moral Reform Society?

The AFMRS sprung out of the Second Great Awakening, a Protestant religious revival that swept across the United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Originally known as the New York Female Moral Reform Society, the AFMRS was founded in 1834 to combat immoral sexual behavior, particularly adultery and prostitution. By 1839, the movement had expanded nationally, leading the group to change its name to the American Female Moral Reform Society. Another name change followed in 1847, when the AFMRS expanded its aid efforts to orphaned children and adopted a new moniker, the American Female Reform and Guardian Society.

The AFMRS was entirely led by women from its inception, with members arguing that women, not men, were best equipped to “educate, warn and galvanize” the public on matters relating to sex work, writes Lisa J. Shaver in Reforming Women: The Rhetorical Tactics of the American Female Moral Reform Society, 1834-1854. The group mobilized women of all social stations to advocate for equal treatment at a time when male-led reform societies encouraged shaming and ignored the experiences of sex workers themselves.

Male reformers were less likely to believe that women became sex workers out of necessity rather than for pleasure. In 1833, the Reverend John McDowall, author of a report that scandalized the public by suggesting New York was home to 10,000 prostitutes, recounted an instance when a teenager approached him for help in leaving the sex trade, explaining that she had no other way to make a living. Skeptical, McDowall told her, “It is better to starve to death than to live in lewdness under the curse of Almighty God.” Had the same girl approached an AFMRS missionary like Prior, she would have been offered food, employment or a place to stay rather than a sermon on morals.

“As the first national women’s reform organization, [the AFMRS] showed that there was power in women organizing to address societal problems,” Shaver tells Smithsonian magazine. The society’s main goal was to abolish the sex trade through direct aid and fair wages while reducing the stigma surrounding the profession. Driven by a religious mandate to purify society by stopping sinful behavior, the AFMRS’s missionaries provided direct outreach to low-income areas. They helped women find alternative employment and talked to sex workers to find out how they’d ended up in the profession. Missionaries also distributed money, medicine and clothes to women in need, simultaneously offering them a handout and a hand up.

Engaging the public was a major aspect of the AFMRS’s work. The society published a periodical called the Advocate of Moral Reform, as well as pamphlets addressed to upper-class audiences. These writings fostered understanding and sympathy toward sex workers while calling for men to be held accountable for their role in perpetuating the sex trade. The AFMRS also encouraged readers to form local auxiliary societies so “that we may thus more effectually cooperate in raising a barrier against the tide of licentiousness, which threatens to overwhelm our beloved country.”

MOOC WHAW1.1x | 4.2.2 The Advocate of Moral Reform with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

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Sex work and the American Female Moral Reform Society

From its inception, the AFMRS took a dual approach to moral reform, simultaneously fighting “the double standard and, indeed, any form of licentiousness,” while sponsoring “a parallel and somewhat more pragmatic attempt to convert and reform New York City’s prostitutes,” writes historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America.

Interviews with sex workers showed that many women were trafficked into the sex trade or began selling their bodies because they needed money. Some of these individuals were victims of rape, which was referred to in the 19th century by euphemisms such as “seduction.” Rape was often conflated with consensual sex, particularly if the woman knew her attacker. Victim-blaming led women of all classes to be ousted by their families, leaving them no other choice than sex work to support themselves.

Seventeen-year-old Anna Robertson “became a prostitute [after] having a rape committed on her, for which the violator of her chastity was sent to prison,” noted an 1839 brothel guide. “But the public exposure she was compelled to make in court was the occasion of her present prostitution.”

When a woman identified only as E.H. was physically abused and abandoned by her husband, she tried to take up employment as a seamstress but was unable to make enough money to make ends meet. As the AFMRS reported in an 1837 edition of the Advocate, E.H. became a sex worker but eventually escaped the life after her friends and family intervened. “If discord, abuse, unfaithfulness and desertion will make the wife happy, then may she wed the libertine with the fair prospect of enjoyment,” the Advocate wrote, “but let her weigh the consequences well before making the hazardous experiment.”

Some women entered the profession in hopes of making a fortune, as sex workers could earn the same amount in a night that a domestic servant or seamstress earned in several weeks, writes Shaver in Reforming Women. But these individuals were the exception, not the norm, and the AFMRS focused its efforts on women who actively sought their counsel to leave sex work.

Members like Prior, the AFMRS’s first female missionary, regularly roamed New York’s poorer neighborhoods, distributing copies of the Advocate and doling out aid to women and children. By making the AFMRS a visible, readily recognizable presence, Prior and other missionaries encouraged those in need to approach them with requests for assistance. “Residents in the neighborhoods she visited knew Prior; they trusted her, and individuals who were reluctant to listen to others often listened to her,” Shaver wrote in a 2012 journal article. Prior’s posthumously published 1843 memoir, Walks of Usefulness, drew on reports from these missionary visits, introducing the AFMRS to an even wider audience.

Later in the AFMRS’s existence, the society’s focus shifted from moral reform to combating poverty, the main reason women cited for engaging in sex work. The group’s longest-lived initiative was the Home for the Friendless, a shelter created to teach young women skills in other trades and provide housing for potential adoptees under the age of 10. Interestingly, former sex workers were not allowed to apply for admission: Prevention, not reclamation, was the home’s goal. Opened in 1846, the shelter remained operational until 1974, more than a century after the AFMRS’s peak.

Mobilizing the public

The AFMRS’s “primary weapon,” according to Shaver, was the Advocate, which members used to raise awareness about trafficking practices, economic disparities and lack of education, all of which spurred on the sex trade. Reformers understood that if women were selling sex, men must be buying sex. Instead of encouraging the ostracization of sex workers, the Advocate suggested—controversially—that the men who solicited them should be shunned instead.

If society were going to hold women to a strict sexual standard, the AFMRS argued, then everyone should be held to that same standard, since sex was necessarily a two-party affair. This demand was one of the group’s most radical, even making its way into the resolutions shared at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering of its kind dedicated to women’s rights in the U.S. “The same amount of virtue, delicacy and refinement of behavior that is required of woman in the social state should also be required of man,” the resolutions stated, “and the same transgressions should be visited with equal severity on both man and woman.”

The AFMRS’s publications also encouraged mothers to teach their children about sexual health, including the risks posed by sexually transmitted infections, which remained poorly understood at the time. By informing their sons and daughters about “the temptations to which they will inevitably be exposed,” the society wrote in an 1836 pamphlet, mothers could “build up a wall of principle around these little ones, which shall stand in coming years to beat back the surges of corruption.” This guidance directly countered the claims of religious leaders who advised silence on the topic of sex, believing that such discussions would encourage wanton behavior.

Doubling down on its insistence on equal standards, the AFMRS published the names of philanderers and men known to solicit brothels or sexually violate women. Unsurprisingly, many men opposed this practice out of fear that they would be socially stigmatized much like sex workers. In 1839, the Advocate reported on a young woman whose brothers stole her copies of the periodical and burned them, saying “their chief objection was the exposure of names,” even as they acknowledged “the justice of the measure.” However, the girl “had no sympathy in their hatred of the paper” and said she would continue reading it. As historian Smith-Rosenberg tells the New York Historical, the AFMRS believed that “no son was too young to be instructed, [and] no husband too authoritative to be reprimanded and reformed.”

As upper- and middle-class women advocated for lower-class women and sex workers, they began to engage in public life outside of the home, rebelling against Victorian ideas about women’s place in the world. The AFMRS drew backlash from male reformers, ministers, upper-class women and even government officials for challenging these dominant narratives. In Michigan, local men formed an Anti-Moral Reform Society to counter the radical new women’s movement. Men in the society refused to associate with moral reformers, posing a direct threat to the women who were dependent on them as their primary breadwinners.

Local chapters known as auxiliaries played a key part in spreading the AFMRS’s message. The parent organization set up a national communication network to coordinate reform efforts and share updates on auxiliaries’ progress and fundraising efforts. In 1837, the Advocate published a letter from Pauline S. Wright, secretary of the Utica, New York, branch, who vowed “not to relapse our efforts till our object is fully accomplished, for we do feel, dear sisters, with you, that we have enlisted in this warfare for life.” That same year, E. Huntly of Orwell, Vermont, wrote that the circulation of “vile books … among the young” had prompted 65 local women to rally together “to train up our children in the way of virtue and religion.”

The legacy of the American Female Moral Reform Society

In Reforming Women, Shaver identifies 1854—the AFMRS’s 20th anniversary—as the point when the society’s members fully transitioned from moral reform to acting as “guardians and institutional managers” through the Home for the Friendless. By then, the group had dropped the word “reform” from its name, becoming simply the American Female Guardian Society.

Instead of lecturing, the AFMRS listened. Instead of shaming, the society empathized. Instead of forcing women to accept their message, missionaries encouraged voluntary reform. The AFMRS not only supported women seeking to leave prostitution but also empowered reformers to advocate for sexual, political and economic equality.

“Reformers were angry that men did not take sexual abuse seriously,” Shaver tells Smithsonian. “Some men were complicit, and others were afraid of condemning other men—some of whom were very powerful.” By advocating for sex workers, she adds, female reformers found that “women often had shared concerns” regardless of location or social status.

While the AFMRS’s agenda doesn’t fully align with modern conceptions of feminism, the group’s critique of domesticity and emphasis on equality represent the early rumblings of a feminist cause. If feminism is defined as “belief in the inherent equality of the sexes,” Shaver argues, then that is exactly what the AFMRS stood for.

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Jenna Deep is an undergraduate at Dickinson College, double majoring in archaeology and history. Her historical interests center around 19th-century America, women’s history and the history of sex work. She is the author of a paper about the interactions between the American Female Moral Reform Society and sex workers.