Reform for the M'Clintock family was not a pastime but a way of life. Their strong reform convictions led them to incorporate improvement of self and society into their religious, family, business, and social networks.

After moving to Waterloo, Mary Ann and Thomas became very active in the local Hicksite community, the Junius Monthly Meeting. When Thomas co-authored the "Basis of Religious Association" in 1848, it established him as a leader in the radical faction of the Hicksite community. In October, several hundred members of the Hicksite community formed the new Progressive Friends, or Friends of Human Progress. Among these were the M'Clintocks, Hunts, and Pryors from Waterloo and Amy and Isaac Post of Rochester. Thomas and Mary Ann served as clerk and associate clerk at nearly every Yearly Meeting while they lived in Waterloo.

The M'Clintocks had many years of experience with abolition reform and working with its national leaders. In 1833, Mary Ann was a founding member, with Lucretia Mott, of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1842, at an annual convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society held in Rochester, Thomas and Mary Ann became founding members of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society and helped write its constitution.

In 1842-43, the American Anti-Slavery Society targeted central and western New York as areas ripe for organization. Abby Kelley and William Lloyd Garrison went on a speaking tour of the region between Rochester and Utica. This tour included stops in Waterloo and Seneca Falls. Mary Ann and Elizabeth M'Clintock served on a committee with Kelley, Amy Post and others, to organize the first antislavery fund raising fair in western New York. The fair raised $300 for the cause. Mary Ann's half-sister, Margaret Pryor, often accompanied Kelley on her tours as a traveling companion and bookkeeper.

At the drugstore, the M'Clintocks -- Thomas, Charles, and Elizabeth -- circulated antislavery petitions and, in rooms above the drugstore, held temperance meetings and ran a school. As members of The Free Produce Society, they sold alternative products made from wool, honey, and molasses as a boycott of slave-made goods. The family sent donations overseas to support Irish famine victims and aid Hungarian revolutionaries in their attempt to gain national independence from the Austrian (Hapsburg) Empire.

It was the vast network of friends and family in abolition that introduced the M'Clintocks to women's rights reform. In return the family urged others to support the beginning of the women's rights movement. Elizabeth M'Clintock used her connection with Frederick Douglass through the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society to invite him to Seneca Falls for the 1848 Convention.

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