The Reverend John S.C. Abbott's best-selling antebellum advice books, The Mother at Home and The Child at Home, are analyzed within the context of Worcester, Massachusetts, the community in which they were written, in the early 1830s. Historians have generally viewed Abbott as a conservative evangelical who advocated the ideal of the self-denying mother. Indeed, Abbott's books were fundamentally pragmatic. The central theme of Abbott's work was not maternal self-sacrifice but maternal self-interest. In an era of high infant mortality and economic instability, good mothering represented not only a child's best hope for salvation but a woman's best hope for a comfortable old age. This article argues that peace of mind and social security not self-denial were the goals of Abbott's evangelical Mother at Home.