Instead, women formed missionary societies to
address all manner of local and international needs, from the support of job training in their communities to funding for African
American missionaries to Africa. They worked on urban ills, established reading groups, and advocated for better living conditions.
They also wrote for religious periodicals, promoting quite traditional ideals of Victorian womanhood, respectability, and racial uplift.
Women also continued work among their less fortunate counterparts in the rural South, in what continued to be an uneasy alliance.
Like male religious leaders, too, they protested the creeping effects of Jim Crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching.