36 Boydston, Home and Work; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Kelly, New England Fashion, p. 44.
37 Some historians see the explosion of unwed childbearing as a result of women’s increased liberation, some as a result of their increased vulnerability. Both of course could be at work at once. For various interpretations, see Seccombe, Millennium (see chap. 8, n. 4); Shorter, Making of the Modern Family; Louise Tilly, Joan Scott, and Miriam Cohen, “Women’s Work and European Fertility Patterns,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1976).
38 Hugh Cunningham, Children and Childhood in Western Society Since 1500 (Harlow, U.K.: Longman, 1995).
39 Mintz, Huck’s Raft.
40 Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. 265.
41 Seccombe, Millennium. For other sources on this and the following paragraphs on economic change, see: Levine, Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism (see chap. 8, n. 30); Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization Before Industrialization (see chap. 8, n. 30); Mendels, “Proto-industrialization” (see chap. 8, n. 30); Medick, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy” (see chap. 8, n. 30); Braun, “Early Industrialization and Demographic Change in the Canton of Zurich” (see chap. 8, n. 30); Gutmann and Leboutte, “Rethinking Protoindustrialization and Family” (see chap. 8, n. 30); Mitterauer, “Peasant and Non-Peasant Family Farms (see chap. 8, n. 30); Pfister, “The Protoindustrial Household Economy” (see chap. 8, n. 30).
42 For an excellent description of how middle-class marital and family strategies changed during the early phases of wage labor and industrialization, see Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
43 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, p. 45. For the early eighteenth-century history of the new emphasis on chastity, see Ingrid Tague, Women of Quality (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell, 2002).
Chapter 10. “Two Birds Within One Nest”
1 T. Walter Herbert, Dearest Beloved: The Hawthornes and the Making of the Middle-Class Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 12-13.
2 Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: Women’s Sphere in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 68; “Empire of Woman,” reprinted in Mary Beth Norton, ed., Major Problems in American Women’s History (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1989), p. 114; Gail Collins, America’s Women (New York: William Morrow, 2004), p. 87.
3 John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 47; Herbert, Dearest Beloved, p. 14.
4 Asa Briggs, A Social History of England (London: Penguin, 1999); Daniel Scott Smith, “The Long Cycle in American Illegitimacy and Prenuptial Pregnancy,” in Laslett, Oosterveen, and Smith, eds., Bastardy (see chap. 2, n. 19); John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).
5 Laslett, Oosterveen, and Smith, Bastardy; André Burguière and François Lebrun, “Priest, Prince, and Family,” in Burguière et al., Impact of Modernity, vol. 2, p. 129; Mark Abrahamson, Out-of-Wedlock Births: The United States in Comparative Perspective (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998); Smith, “Long Cycle”; Judith Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
6 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, p. 70; Smith, Changing Lives, p. 181; G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976), pp. 275, 278.
7 Quoted in Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 41.
8 Steven Ruggles, Prolonged Connections: The Rise of the Extended Family in Nineteenth-Century England and America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).
9 Quotes from Gottlieb, The Family in the Western World pp. 252, 254 (see chap. 7, n. 8). On the peasant attachment to the domus, see Ladurie, Montaillou (see chap. 7, n. 8).
10 Kirk Jeffrey, “The Family as Utopian Retreat from the City,” Soundings 55 (1972), p. 28. For the other quotes, see Ladies Book 1 (1840), p. 331; Southern Literary Messenger 1 (1835), p. 508; John Todd, The Moral Influence, Dangers and Duties, Connected with Great Cities (Northampton, Mass.: 1841).
11 Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 187; Taine quoted in John Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 28.
12 Leonore Davidoff, “The Family in Britain,” in F. M. L. Thompson, ed., The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990), vol. 2, p. 71. Pockels, quoted in Smith, Changing Lives, p. 183. See also Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud, vol. 4: The Naked Heart (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).
13 Hale quotes, from G. R. Searle, Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 156, and Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 102-03.
14 Searle, Morality and the Market, p. 156; Barbara Pope, “Angel’s in the Devil’s Workshop,” in Bridenthal et al., Becoming Visible (see chap. 3, n. 39).
15 Woloch, Women and the American Experience, p. 105.
16 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 54-55; Tosh, Man’s Place, p. 55; Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life, p. 198. Another minister advised businessmen that despite a wife’s ignorance of practical matters, she could often serve as a moral “mentor.”
17 Mary Ryan, “The Power of Women’s Networks,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981). On domestic feminism, see Daniel Scott Smith, “Family Limitation, Sexual Control, and Domestic Feminism in Victorian America,” in Mary Hartmann and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
18 E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 107. For more on men’s acceptance of domesticity in the United States, see Stephen Frank, Life with Father: Parenthood and Masculinity in the Nineteenth-Century American North (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
19 Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 5.
20 Orvar Lofgren, “Families and Households: Images and Reality,” in Robert McC. Netting, Richard Wilk, and Eric Arnould, eds., Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 456. Laborer quoted in Gillis, For Better, for Worse, p. 112 (see chap. 7, n. 13). On the evolution of the word family and the resentment of servants and hired hands at being excluded from it in the early nineteenth century, see Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 132.
21 Lawrence Stone quoted in Gillis, For Better, for Worse, p. 138; Ellen Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), pp. 81-82, 175-76; Peter Ward, Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990), p. 117.
22 This custom persisted in some areas until the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1856 a surprised northern observer described a typical “Christmas Serenade” in St. Augustine, Texas. A band of “pleasant spirits . . . blowing tin horns and beating tin pans,” he reported, visited every house in town, “kicking in doors and pulling down fences until every male member of the family had appeared with appropriate instruments and joined the merry party.” Penne Restad, Christmas in America: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Peter Stearns, “The Making of the Domestic Occasion: The History of Thanksgiving in the United States,” Journal of Social History 32 (1999). On the invention of the Sund
ay dinner, see John Gillis, A World of Their Own Making: Myth, Ritual, and the Quest for Family Values (New York: Basic Books, 1997). For a good description of the sentimentalization and privatization of celebrations in the nineteenth century, see Elizabeth Pleck, Celebrating the Family (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). For a contrasting description of the dense ties beyond the nuclear family prevailing in the eighteenth century, see Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
23 Gillis, World of Their Own Making, p. 101; Restad, Christmas, p. 41; Stearns, “Domestic Occasion.”
24 Pleck, Celebrating the Family.
25 Mark Fann, A Republic of Men: The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Adams quoted in W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, Broken Promises: How America Fails Its Children (New York: Basic Books, 1982), p. 283.
26 Coontz, Social Origins, pp. 226-29, 235; Kathryn Sklar, Catharine Beecher (New York: Norton, 1976); Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 37, 52-53; Russell Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (New York: Pyramid, 1966), p. 22.
27 William McLoughlin, The Meaning of Henry Ward Beecher: An Essay on the Shifting Values of Mid-Victorian America, 1840-1870 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), pp. 115-16.
28 Rosemary O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500-1900: England, France and the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); James Riley, Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Cynthia Comacchio, The Infinite Bonds of Family: Domesticity in Canada, 1850-1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). On the struggles of slave families, see Emily West, Chains of Love: Slave Couples in Antebellum South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) and Brenda Stevenson, “Distress and Discord in Virginia Slave Families,” in Carol Bleser, ed., In Joy and in Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
29 Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Faye Dudden, Serving Women: Household Service in 19th-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983); David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987); Flanders, Inside the Victorian Home.
30 James McMillan, Housewife or Harlot: The Place of Women in French Society 1870-1940 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), p. 9; Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work:1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 87-88; D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, p. 70.
31 Josef Ehmer, “Marriage,” in David Kertzer and Mario Barbagli, eds., The History of the European Family, vol. 2, Family Life in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1789-1913 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 320; Charles Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th-Century America,” American Quarterly 25 (1973), p. 139.
32 Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American History 60 (1973); Ladies’ Companion 9 (1838); William and Robin Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Susan Phinney Conrad, Perish the Thought: Intellectual Women in Romantic America, 1830-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
33 Amy Erickson, Women’s Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993); Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination (chap. 7, n. 41); Susan Okin, “Women and the Making of the Sentimental Family,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 11 (1982).
34 Nancy Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology,” in Nancy Cott and Elizabeth Pleck, eds., A Heritage of Her Own (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Duby, Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages, pp. 27-28 (see chap. 7, n. 3).
35 John Demos, “The American Family in Past Time,” American Scholar, 43 (1974); Dr. John Cowan, in Ronald Walters, ed., Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
36 Peter Laipson, “ ‘Kiss Without Shame, for She Desires It,’ ” Journal of Social History (1996), p. 507; Norton, Major Problems, p. 228.
37 D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, p. 180.
38 Cormany quoted in Shawn Johansen, Family Men: Middle-Class Fatherhood in Early Industrializing America (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 51.
39 Walters, Primers for Prudery; Cott, “Passionless”; James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Janet Brodie, Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
40 Estelle Freedman, The History of the Family and the History of Sexuality (Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association, 1998); D’Emilio and Freeman, Intimate Matters; Daniel Scott Smith, “ ‘Early’ Fertility Decline in America,” Journal of Family History 12 (1987). Michael Anderson, “The Social Implications of Demographic Change,” in Thompson, Cambridge Social History, vol. 2; Alison Prentice et al., Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace, 1996); Miller, Transformations of Patriarchy in the West (see chap. 8, n. 33).
41 David Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control, 1868-1900 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1973).
42 Mary Ann Glendon, The Transformation of Family Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 238.
43 Jennine Hurl-Eamon, “Domestic Violence Prosecuted: Women Binding over their Husbands for Assault at Westminster Quarter Sessions, 1685-1720,” Journal of Family History 26 (2001); M. Hunt, “Wife Beating, Domesticity and Women’s Independence in Eighteenth-Century London,” Gender and History, 4 (1992); R. P. Dobash and R. E. Dobash, “Community Response to Violence Against Wives: Charivari, Abstract Justice, and Patriarchy,” Social Problems 28 (1981); Leah Leneman, Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce, 1684-1830 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life (London: Routledge, 1992); Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1998); Leah Leneman, “ ‘A Tyrant and Tormentor’: Violence Against Wives in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland,” Continuity and Change 12 (1997); Linda Hirshman and Jane Larson, Hard Bargains: The Politics of Sex (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Steven Mintz, “Regulating the American Family,” in Joseph Hawes and Elizabeth Nybakken, eds., Family and Society in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001).
44 Riley, Rising Life Expectancy, pp. 172-79.
45 Anderson, “Social Implications,” p. 27; Phillips, Putting Asunder, p. 393 (see chap. 9, n. 17).
46 For this and the next paragraph, see Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Work in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Francis Early, “The French-Canadian Family Economy and Standard-of-Living in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1870,” Journal of Family History 7 (1982), p. 184; Michael Haines, “Industrial Work and the Family Life Cycle, 1889-1890,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979), p. 291; Claudia Goldin, Understanding the Gender Gap: On the Economic History of American Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Colin Creighton, “The Rise of the Male Breadwinner Family,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996); Joanna Bourke, “Housewifery in Working-Class England,” in Pamela Sharpe, ed., Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650-1914 (London: Arnold Publishers, 1998), p. 339; Sara Horrell and Ja
ne Humphries, “Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family,” Economic History Review 48 (1995).
47 Simonton, History of European Women’s Work, p. 262; Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London, New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 111-24.
48 Riley, Rising Life Expectancy; Ute Frevert, “The Civilizing Tendency of Hygiene,” in John Fout, ed., German Women in the Nineteenth Century (London: Holmes & Meier, 1984); S. D. Chapman, ed., The History of Working Class Housing (London: David & Charles, 1971); Anna Clark, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage,” Journal of Social History (2000).
49 Thomas Hine, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager (New York: Perennial Books, 1999), p. 125; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 147.
Chapter 11. “A Heaving Volcano”
1 The quotes from Franklin and Sedgwick in the following paragraphs are from Zsuzsa Berend, “ ‘The Best or None!’ Spinsterhood in Nineteenth-Century New England,” Journal of Social History 33 (2000), p. 937.
2 For more on this transformation, see Rotundo, American Manhood, p.110 (see chap. 10, n. 18); Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, Victoria to Freud: The Naked Heart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 100.
3 Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 22-23, 45, 50.
4 Catherine Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women’s Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 147; Peter Ward, Courtship, Love, and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century English Canada (Buffalo: McGill-Queens University Press, 1990), p. 156. Historian Peter Gay notes that Americans of that era reversed the judgment of earlier generations and came to think that an inability to fall in love was a worse flaw in an individual than a tendency to fall in love too easily. Gay, The Bourgeois Experience, p. 100.
Marriage, a History Page 49
