274 Chapter 10 The Making of Middle-Class America
Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young
Ladies(1841). “The mother forms the character of
the future man.”
Another reason for the shift in domestic influ-
ence from husbands to wives was that women
began to have fewer children. Here again, the
change happened earliest and was most pro-
nounced among families in the rapidly urbanizing
Northeast. On the frontier, where middle-class
norms lagged behind, couples generally had larger
families. (See Mapping the Past, “Family Size:
Northeast vs. Frontier” pp. 272–273.) But the
birthrate gradually declined all over the country.
People married later than in earlier periods. Long
courtships and broken engagements were common,
probably because prospective marriage partners
were becoming more selective. On average, women
began having their children two or three years later
than their mothers had, and they stopped two or
three years sooner. Apparently many middle-class
couples made a conscious effort to limit family size,
even when doing so required sexual abstinence.
Having fewer children led parents to value chil-
dren more highly, or so it would seem from the
additional time and affection they lavished on them.
Here again, the mother provided most of both.
Child rearing fell within her “sphere” and occupied
the time that earlier generations of mothers had
devoted to such tasks as weaving, sewing, and farm
chores. Not least of these new responsibilities was
overseeing the children’s education, both secular
and religious.
As families became smaller, relations within them
became more caring. Parents ceased to think of their
children mostly as future workers. The earlier tendency
even among loving parents to keep their children at
arm’s length, yet within reach of the strap, gave way to
more intimate relationships. Gone was the puritan
notion that children possessed “a perverse will, a love of
what’s forbid,” and with it the belief that parents were
responsible for crushing all juvenile resistance to their
authority. In its place arose the view described by Lydia
Maria Child in The Mother’s Book(1831) that children
“come to us from heaven, with their little souls full of
innocence and peace.” Mothers “should not interfere
with the influence of angels,” Child advised her readers.
Bronson Alcott, another proponent of gentle
child-rearing practices, went still further. Children, he
insisted, were the moral superiors of their parents.
Alcott banished “the rod and all its appendages” from
his own household, wherein four daughters (one,
Louisa May, later the author of Little Womenand
other novels) were raised, and urged other parents to
follow his example. “Childhood hath saved me!” he
wrote. The English poet William Wordsworth’s
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood,” in which babies entered the
world “trailing clouds of glory,” served some
American parents as a child-rearing manual.
Carey,Rules for Husbands and Wivesat
myhistorylab.com
Beecher, from A Treatise on Domestic
Economyatmyhistorylab.com
Mother’s Magazineatmyhistorylab.comThe Second Great Awakening
The basic goodness of children contradicted the
Calvinist doctrine of infant damnation, to which
most American Protestant churches formally sub-
scribed. “Of all the impious doctrines which the
dark imagination of man ever conceived,” Bronson
Alcott wrote in his journal, “the worst [is] the
belief in original and certain depravity of infant
nature.” Alcott was far from alone in thinking
infant damnation a “debased doctrine,” despite its
standing as one of the central tenets of orthodox
Calvinism. Mothers enshrined infancy and child-
hood; they became increasingly active and vocal in
church. They scathingly indicted the concept of
infant damnation.
The inclination to set aside other Calvinist
tenets, such as predestination, became more pro-
nounced as a new wave of revivalism took shape in
the 1790s. ThisSecond Great Awakeningbegan
as a counteroffensive to the deistic thinking and
other forms of “infidelity” that New England
Congregationalists and southern Methodists alike
identified with the French Revolution. Prominent
New England ministers, who considered them-
selves traditionalists but also revivalists (men such
as Yale’s president, Timothy Dwight, and Dwight’s
student, the Reverend Lyman Beecher) placed less
stress in their sermons on God’s arbitrary power
over mortals, and more on the promise of the salva-
tion of sinners because of God’s mercy and “disin-
terested benevolence.” When another of Dwight’s
students, Horace Bushnell, declared in a sermon on
“Christian nurture” in 1844 that Christian parents
should prepare their children “for the skies,” he
meant that parents could contribute to their chil-
dren’s salvation.
Calvinism came under more direct assault from
Charles Grandison Finney, probably the most effec-
tive of a number of charismatic Evangelists who
brought the Second Great Awakening to its crest. In
1821 Finney abandoned a promising career as aReadtheDocumentReadtheDocumentReadtheDocument