10

The Making of

Middle-Class America

The Making of

Middle-Class America

CONTENTS

■Joseph Moore and His Family(1839), by Erastus Salisbury Field, reflects the

emerging middle-class family. Although the painting is named after the father,

the mother is carefully placed in a precisely equivalent position; each child has

a space of his or her own.

Source: Photograph © 2012 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

269

rare partly because so few could obtain it. South

Carolina recognized no legal grounds for divorce.

Many other states granted divorce only if a spouse

committed adultery. Many couples thus endured love-

less, unhappy marriages.

Nevertheless the family after 1820 was perceived as

a new and dynamic force in American society. Middle-

class women, especially those freed from the drudgery

of farm chores, were especially influential. Sarah Hale,

the leading female journalist of the era, pronounced

women to be “God’s appointed agents of morality.”

Such women organized religious revivals, spearheaded

efforts to improve prisons and mental asylums, and cam-

paigned for temperance, abolition, and women’s rights.

Young middle-class women, too, were avid readers, and

their patronage stimulated publication of countless

books and magazines. These women shaped society and

culture even more directly by serving as teachers in the

common schools that extended public education to

much of the nation.

The reformers of the era decried the pessimism of

their Calvinist forebears. Romanticism in the arts and lit-

erature affirmed that Americans and their institutions

could—and would—grow and change for the better. ■

■Tocqueville: Democracy in

America

■The Family Recast

■The Second Great Awakening

■The Era of Associations

■Backwoods Utopias

■The Age of Reform

■“Demon Rum”

■The Abolitionist Crusade

■Women’s Rights

■The Romantic View of Life

■Emerson and Thoreau

■Edgar Allan Poe

■Nathaniel Hawthorne

■Herman Melville

■Walt Whitman

■Reading and the

Dissemination of Culture

■Education for Democracy

■The State of the Colleges

■Mapping the Past:

Family Size: Northeast

vs. Frontier

HeartheAudio Chapter 10 at http://www.myhistorylab.com