Home, Work, and Middle-Class Emergence

1. Home, Work, and Middle-Class Emergence “The Nest at Home,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, January 1850

2. The Four Seasons of Life: Middle Age Lithograph by Currier and Ives, New York, 1868

3. Useful Sources on Gender and Middle Class Formation • 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

4. [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

5. Preliminary Questions • 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?

6. More Questions: • How are gender and class categories mutually informing? • How do we interpret popular cultural forms like Godey’s Lady’s Book?

7. Difficulty of defining “middle class”: • Term refers not only to occupation or economic circumstances, but also to one’s goals and lifestyle.

8. Five aspects of middle-class identity • Work • Consumption • Residential location • Formal and informal voluntary associations • Family organization and strategy

9. Middle-Class Work • Growing removal of work from the home • Increasing separation of non-manual and manual workers in larger enterprises

10. 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

11. Factory Production and the Transformation of Work and Class Slater Mill, 1793 as it appeared circa 1810

12. Changing Conditions of Labor 1790-1850 Skilled Toolmaker, 1850

13. 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

14. Home as an antidote to middle-class 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

15. Consumption • 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

16. “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

17. Fashion and Middle-Class Identity Fashion Plates from Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1850

18. Residence • Middle-class home as the expression of claims to genteel status • Contrast with elite and working-class homes • Importance of the parlor

19. 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)

20. 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.

21. Standardization of the middle-class home: Gervase Wheeler’s Homes for the People, 1855

22. Middle-class row houses front on Pine Street in Philadelphia

23. 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

24. Voluntary Associations • 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

25. Family organization and strategy • 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

26. “The canon of domesticity expressed the dominance of what may be designated a middle-class 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)

27. Frontispiece to Beecher and Stowe’s American Woman’s Home: • Illustrates what Cott terms “a cultural preference for domestic retirement and conjugal-family intimacy.”

28. Middle-Class True Womanhood • 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?

29. Piety: “The Christian Home” Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869)

30. Reading as a middle-class pastime: • 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

31. 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 middle-class 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

32. See also “Points of Etiquette” in 1850 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book

33. 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

34. 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.

35. T.S. Arthur, 1809-1885 • Popular 19th-century writer of didactic fiction • Wrote Ten Nights in a Bar-Room and What I Saw There (1854) and other temperance narratives • Also wrote sentimental stories for middle-class, female readership

36. Godey’s Lady’s Book • 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

37. “Sweethearts and Wives”: • 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?

38. 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)

39. 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)

40. “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)

41. …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)