New York Female Moral Reform Society

[2] In time, the NYFMRS became one of the most well-known moral reform organizations of the period and even expanded its influence to other cities across America.

Five years after its establishment, the NYFMRS already had 445 auxiliaries, and thus changed its name in 1839 to the American Female Moral Reform Society in the hopes that membership would expand even further.

A report by the NYFMRS in the 1830s found that servants, chambermaids, and milliners were the most common occupations linked with prostitution.

While some organizations tried to reclaim women who had fallen into prostitution, moral reform societies like NYFMRS were convinced that prevention was their primary concern.

Some of these strategies included entering brothels and praying for the prostitutes and their clients, lobbying the state to make male solicitation of prostitutes a crime and threatening to publish names in their monthly journal of the men who regularly visited brothels.