In the New England fashion : reshaping women's lives in the nineteenth century / Catherine E. Kelly.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kelly, Catherine E.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Women--New England--History.

Women.

Rural women--New England--History.

Rural women.

Middle class--New England--History.

Middle class.

History.

New England.

Physical Description:

xiii, 258 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.

Summary:

In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes their attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life. In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contribution to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation of the countryside and the origins of the Northern middle class.

Provincial women exalted rural life for its republican simplicity while condemning that of the city for its aristocratic pretension. The idyllic nature of the former was ascribed the financial independence that the household economy had long provided those in the farming community. Kelly examines how the juxtaposition of rural virtue to urban vice served as a cautionary defense against the new realities of the capitalist market society. She finds that women responded to the transition to capitalism by upholding a set of values which point toward the creation of a provincial bourgeoisie.

Contents:

Chapter 1 "It seems like a little paradise compared with the city" 1

Chapter 2 "All the work of the family" 19

Chapter 3 "Never was a separation so painful" 64

Chapter 4 "With joy I bear his name and pay the duties which his virtue claims" 93

Chapter 5 "Old people never believe in Love" 127

Chapter 6 "Simple ideals of living" 162

Chapter 7 "All the artificial barriers which society sometimes erects, appeared to be thrown down" 188

Chapter 8 "Joining anon in fashion's noisy din" 214

Chapter 9 "An elevated tone to the whole town" 242.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0801430763

OCLC:

39627542