<p> After the Civil War, pro-woman organizations flourished in the United States as local activists responded to a broad analysis of the causes and consequences of women&rsquo;s limitations in education, employment and civic life. This dissertation introduces the concept of "exalted womanhood" to encompass the widespread, if somewhat vague, belief that women&rsquo;s lives could be improved by transcending these limits. It argues that the proliferation of grassroots organizations and national networks was a self-consciously feminist strategy to elevate the status of women&mdash;efforts that went well beyond the suffrage movement during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For many women, pro-woman work offered unprecedented opportunities for self-development, social prominence, and political involvement. </p><p> This study is set in Worcester, Massachusetts, a mid-sized industrial city in New England, that served as the site of the first two national woman&rsquo;s rights conventions in 1850 and 1851. Local memory of these events remained strong throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and helped sustain a complex feminist landscape. More specifically, the pro-woman activism in Worcester demonstrates how the broad agenda of the antebellum woman&rsquo;s rights movement splintered but continued to thrive in the post-Civil War era, as suffrage organizations, the Worcester Woman&rsquo;s Club and the Young Women&rsquo;s Christian Association emphasized different aspects of an earlier agenda. </p><p> In addition, the examination of pro-woman organizations in one urban community provides a new window into well-studied national networks. Local groups, working together however haphazardly created regional and national umbrella organizations including the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the General Federation of Women&rsquo;s Clubs, and the International Board of the Young Women&rsquo;s Christian Association. The motivating force of exalted womanhood resulted in the establishment of a vast feminist network connecting organized women from every corner of the country. The local created the national, not the other way around.</p><p>