Evangelical Revivalism and the Expanding Women’s Domain: The Eastern Half of the Yankee Belt, the 1820s to 1840s

Abstract

The focus on the Protestant women’s role in American religious history during the religious revivalism of the early nineteenth century continues to gain an increasing amount of attention. Generally regarded as the family economy and frontier generation: conferences, houses, outdoor meetings, and crowded churches created the religious revivalism that became known as the Second Great Awakening. Following 1790, the New England revivals that swarmed Massachusetts and Connecticut swept waves of religious zeal primarily westward across the Yankee hill country. The revivals penetrating New York and western Pennsylvania reached a grand climax in western New York between the 1820s to the early 1840s. These peaking decades promoted evangelistic mission networks that followed the contours of trade routes which intertwined with economic trends and Yankee inheritance. During this period, women who were most active in the revivals wisely used resources and gained support in the spreading of missionary work, and voluntary and benevolent endeavors. They embraced the waves of revivalism to expand the lines of gender and class first in the Yankee belt that shifted the family and community life, which definitions still leave scholars perplexed and are highlighted.