Home, Work, and
Middle-Class Emergence
“The Nest at Home,” Godey’s
Lady’s Book, January 1850
The Four Seasons of Life: Middle Age
Lithograph by Currier and Ives, New York, 1868
Useful Sources on Gender and
Middle Class Formation
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Mary Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, 1983
Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle
Class, 1989
Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room and
Other Tales of Victorian Culture, 1992
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 1977
[T]he period between 1780 and 1830 was a time of wide and
deep-ranging transformation, including the beginning of rapid
intensive economic growth, especially in foreign commerce,
agricultural productivity, and the fiscal and banking system; the
start of sustained urbanization; demographic transition toward
modern fertility patterns; marked change toward social
stratification by wealth and growing inequality in the distribution
of wealth; rapid pragmatic adaptation in the law; shifts from
unitary to pluralistic networks in personal association;
unprecedented expansion in primary education; democratization
of the political process; invention of a new language of political
and social thought; and -- not least -- with respect to family life,
the appearance of "domesticity."
Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood, 3
Preliminary Questions
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Has the United States always been a
middle class nation?
What do we mean when we use the term
“middle class”?
When and how did the middle class
emerge?
What differentiated the middle class from
other social strata in the early 19th century?
More Questions:
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How are gender and class categories
mutually informing?
How do we interpret popular cultural
forms like Godey’s Lady’s Book?
Difficulty of defining “middle class”:
Term refers not only to occupation or
economic circumstances, but also to
one’s goals and lifestyle.
Five aspects of middle-class identity
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Work
Consumption
Residential location
Formal and informal voluntary associations
Family organization and strategy
Middle-Class Work
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Growing removal of work from the home
Increasing separation of non-manual and
manual workers in larger enterprises
Preindustrial Modes of Labor:
•Shared Space of Home and Work
•Fluid interaction of Masters and Workers
Shoemaker and his
journeymen
apprentices in
workshop that would
have been attached to
the master
craftsman’s home,
circa 1800
Factory Production and the Transformation of
Work and Class
Slater Mill, 1793 as it appeared circa 1810
Changing Conditions of Labor 1790-1850
Skilled Toolmaker, 1850
Middle-Class Work and the Ideal of Self-Made Manhood
•Increasingly urban
•Fluid and migratory
•Influenced by:
•economic expansion
•extension of suffrage
•expansion of common schools
•evangelism
•Competitive and morally suspect
nature of middle-class men’s work:
•Relies on compensatory morality
and sentimentalism of the
middle-class home
Home as an antidote to middleclass public sphere:
"It is at home, where man . . . seeks a refuge from
the vexations and embarrassments of business, an
enchanting repose from exertion, a relaxation from
care by the interchange of affection: where some of
his finest sympathies, tastes, and moral and religious
feelings are formed and nourished;--where is the
treasury of pure disinterested love, such as is seldom
found in the busy walks of a selfish and calculating
world.“
New Hampshire pastor, 1827
Consumption
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Increasing standard of living for all
Americans in the early 19th century
Increasing availability of consumer goods
Household consumption as a means of
establishing claims to middle-class status
Consumption, gender, and power
“Consumption too was a family strategy, a more or less deliberate attempt to shape the
domestic environment in ways that signified social respectability, and that facilitated the
acquisition of habits of personal deportment that set a family apart from both the rough
world of the mechanics and the artificial world of fashion.” -Stuart Blumin
Fashion and Middle-Class Identity
Fashion Plates from
Godey’s Lady’s
Book, 1850
Residence
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Middle-class home as the expression of
claims to genteel status
Contrast with elite and working-class
homes
Importance of the parlor
Time was when it was sufficient for a comfortable liver to have
half a house, or to have one spare front-room for company: now,
the same man must have a whole house, and the first story must
be thrown into parlors. Not very long since, one servant, for
general purposes, was all that was deemed necessary: now, the
requirement is extended to two certainly, with special aid for extra
occasions, and a nurse for the little ones. . . .It is not many years
since the class spoken of were only occasionally favored with a
piano: now, that instrument must be set down as a requisite to
parlor equipment. The same is true of the dietetic department, of
our social entertainments and modes of dressing – great changes
have occurred with our so-called advancing civilization.
--Isaac Ferris, The Man of Business: Their Home
Responsibilities” (1857)
In the years between 1827 and 1860 the new middle class
enjoyed a number of important advances in everyday
consumption. The bare floors, whitewashed walls, and scant
furniture of middle-income eighteenth-century homes gave way
to wool carpeting, wallpaper, and all manner of furnishings.
The houses themselves became relatively cheaper and grew in
size from three rooms to four-to-six rooms in row houses or
flats in row houses. The children slept one to a bed, and indoor
toilets became common in their homes. In contrast to the
eighteenth century when the middle-income house generally
included the shop, the husband now commonly worked in an
office, store or shop outside his home, and the first-floor, front
room became a parlor instead of a family trade or shop; they
could take full advantage of the new public grammar school
education. Finally, they had grown prosperous enough to
attend the increasing variety of offerings of commercial
downtown entertainment.
--Samuel Bass Warner, Jr., The Private City (1968), 66.
Standardization of the
middle-class home:
Gervase Wheeler’s
Homes for the People,
1855
Middle-class row houses
front on Pine Street in
Philadelphia
Working-class row houses:
“The better tenements of New
York, and the workingmen’s
houses of Boston,
Philadelphia, Baltimore, and
other cities, provided skilled
mechanics and their families
with housing that may have
been adequate in many
respects, but that was neither
spacious, attractive, nor very
comfortable.” –Stuart Blumin
Voluntary Associations
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Early 19th century as the “Age of
Association”
Attractiveness of horizontal associations
reflects democratic ideals of the age
Associations divided along class, racial,
and gender lines
Example: Female Benevolent Society of
Weybridge
Family organization and strategy
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Separation of “home” and “work” as a
defining attribute of middle-class life
“Home” as “haven in a heartless world”
Canon of domesticity and the importance
of woman’s place
Decreasing fertility and home production
and the changing nature of middle-class
women’s work
“The canon of domesticity expressed the
dominance of what may be designated a middleclass ideal, a cultural preference for domestic
retirement and conjugal-family intimacy over
both the ‘vain’ and fashionable sociability of the
rich and the promiscuous sociability of the poor.”
--Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood
(1977)
Frontispiece to Beecher and
Stowe’s American Woman’s
Home:
Illustrates what Cott
terms “a cultural
preference for domestic
retirement and conjugalfamily intimacy.”
Middle-Class True Womanhood
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Piety
Purity
Domesticity
Submissiveness
How are these ideals evident in Godey’s
Lady’s Book, and particularly in the stories
by T.S. Arthur and Mrs. Joseph C. Neal?
Piety:
“The Christian Home”
Beecher and Stowe,
The American
Woman’s Home
(1869)
Reading as a middle-class pastime:
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Common schools meant increased literacy
Changes in print technology and
transportation made publication and
distribution easier
Etiquette manuals
T.S. Arthur and Godey’s Lady’s Book
According to historian Karen
Halttunen, approximately 70
American etiquette manuals
were published between
1830 and 1860, and many
went through several
editions. These etiquette
manuals further helped to
engender a shared middleclass identity by holding out
the promise of republican
society—that social
respectability was not
dependent on money alone
but could be achieved by
learning the proper manners.
--from The Lost Museum
See also “Points of
Etiquette” in 1850
issue of Godey’s
Lady’s Book
At Top:
Bad Manners at the Table
At Bottom:
Gentility in the Dining
Room
From Thomas E. Hill,
Manual of Social and
Business Forms,
1892
In the nineteenth century, middle-class people
wanted everyone to be middle class or at least to
subscribe to middle-class values and behaviors.
Values and behaviors that were not middle class
were not merely different; they were morally
evaluated as “bad.” Although this image allegedly
demonstrates “bad” manners, it can more accurately
be described as recording certain working-class
manners.
--Kenneth Ames, Death in the Dining Room
(1992), 211.
T.S. Arthur, 1809-1885
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Popular 19th-century writer of
didactic fiction
Wrote Ten Nights in a Bar-
Room and What I Saw There
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(1854) and other temperance
narratives
Also wrote sentimental stories
for middle-class, female
readership
Godey’s Lady’s Book
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Most popular example of the
ladies’ magazine in antebellum
period
Published colorful illustrations
along with sentimental
literature
Advertising and consumer
goods relegated to back pages
Benefited from emergence of
literate, middle-class female
readership
“Sweethearts and Wives”:
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How do we make sense of this story?
As didactic fiction written by a male author
for a middle-class female readership, is it
purely a reflection of dominant cultural
ideals?
Or does it leave room for alternative
readings?
Fairfield installed his wife mistress of a neatly furnished
house, and both settled themselves down in it, brimful of present
pleasure, and delightful anticipations. The two servants managed
things pretty well for the first few weeks, but after that, many
irregularities became apparent. The meals were often half an hour
beyond the usual and set time, and were frequently very badly
cooked. The sweeping and dusting were carelessly done, and the
furniture, from want of attention, began to look a little dingy,
much to the annoyance of Mrs. Fairfield. Still, it did not occur to
her, that she was wrong in leaving every thing to her servants. It
never came into her thoughts that her mind should be the
governing one of her household, in all things, great and small, as
much as was her husband’s the governing mind in his business.
The idea, that she was to take pleasure in exemption from
domestic duties, and not in the performance of them, was fully
entertained by her, and this her husband soon perceived, and it
pained him much, for her saw that in this false idea was an active
germ of future disquietude. (140-41)
And they did, really love one another, but had not yet
learned to accommodate themselves to each other’s
peculiarities. Fairfield was to blame, as well as Agnes. He
should have been open and candid towards her, and have
explained to her rationally, calmly, and affectionately, her
duty; but he shrunk from this for fear of wounding her, thus
wounding her a thousand times more acutely, in permitting
her to go on in actions and omissions the natural results of
which, were exceedingly painful to the heart of a young and
loving wife. (144)
“Surely,” she said “William, you do not wish to see
your wife a drudge?”
“Not by any means, Agnes. But, then, I wish to see
her engaged in the steady performance of every duty
required by her station; because I know that only by doing
so, can she render herself and family truly happy. No station,
my dear wife, is exempt from its cares and its duties; if these
are faithfully and willingly assumed, peace of mind will follow;
if neglected pain. As the mistress of a family, the comfort of
others is placed in your hands, and, particularly, that of your
husband….(145)
…Your error lies in a false idea which you have entertained,
that your happiness was to come somewhere from out of
your domestic duties, instead of in the performance of
them—that they were not part of a wife’s obligations, but
something that she could put aside if she were able to hire
enough servants. I cannot, thus, delegate my business
duties to any one; without my governing mind and constant
attention, every thing would soon be in disorder, and an utter
failure, instead of prosperity, be the result of my efforts. By
my carefulness and constant devotion to business, I am
enabled to provide you with every comfort; surely, then, you
should be willing also to give careful attention to your
department, that I may feel home to be a pleasant place….
(146)