How Has the Changing Role of Women in the United States Affected the Family?

In the first half of the nineteenth century, families in the northern United States increasingly participated in the greenbacks economy created by the market place revolution. The first stirrings of industrialization shifted work away from the dwelling. These changes transformed Americans' notions of what constituted work, and therefore shifted what it meant to be an American woman and an American homo. As Americans encountered more appurtenances in stores and produced fewer at home, the ability to remove women and children from work determined a family'southward class status. This platonic, of course, ignored the reality of women's work at home and was possible for only the wealthy. The marketplace revolution therefore not only transformed the economic system, information technology inverse the nature of the American family. Equally the market revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it redefined gender roles. The market integrated families into a new cash economy, and as Americans purchased more goods in stores and produced fewer at home, the activities of the domestic sphere—the idealized realm of women and children—increasingly signified a family unit's form status.

Women and children worked to supplement the depression wages of many male workers.  Effectually historic period eleven or twelve, boys could take jobs as office runners or waiters, earning perhaps a dollar a week to support their parents' incomes. The platonic of an innocent and protected childhood was a privilege for heart- and upper-class families, who might await downward upon poor families. Joseph Tuckerman, a Unitarian minister who served poor Bostonians, lamented the lack of discipline and regularity among poor children: "At 1 60 minutes they are kept at piece of work to procure fuel, or perform some other service; in the next are allowed to go where they volition, and to do what they volition." Prevented from attention school, poor children served instead as economic assets for their destitute families.

Meanwhile, the education received by middle-class children provided a foundation for hereafter economic privilege. As artisans lost command over their trades, young men had a greater incentive to invest time in education to observe skilled positions afterwards in life. Formal schooling was specially important for young men who desired apprenticeships in retail or commercial work. Enterprising instructors established schools to assistance "immature gentlemen preparing for mercantile and other pursuits, who may wish for an education superior to that unremarkably obtained in the common schools, merely different from a higher education, and better adjusted to their particular business," such as that organized in 1820 past Warren Colburn of Boston. In response to this need, the Boston Schoolhouse Committee created the English language High Schoolhouse (as opposed to the Latin Schoolhouse) that could "give a child an educational activity that shall fit him for agile life, and shall serve as a foundation for eminence in his profession, whether Mercantile or Mechanical" beyond that "which our public schools tin now replenish."

Instruction equipped young women with the tools to to live sophisticated, gentile lives. After sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Davis left home in 1816 to nourish school, her begetter explained that the experience would "lay a foundation for your future character & respectability." After touring the Us in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville praised the independence granted to the young American woman, who had "the great scene of the globe…open up to her" and whose educational activity "arm[ed] her reason as well as her virtue." Middling young women likewise utilized their didactics to take positions as school teachers in the expanding common school system. Bristol Academy in Tauten, Maine, for instance, advertised "teaching…in the fine art of pedagogy" for female person pupils. In 1825, Nancy Denison left Concord University with references indicating that she was "qualified to teach with success and turn a profit" and "very cheerfully recommend[ed]" for "that very responsible employment."

Equally middle-class youths found opportunities for respectable employment through formal pedagogy, poor youths remained in marginalized positions. Their families' desperate financial land kept them from enjoying the fruits of teaching. When pauper children did receive teaching through institutions such the Business firm of Refuge in New York City, they were often simultaneously indentured to successful families to serve as field hands or domestic laborers. The Social club for the Reformation of Juvenile Delinquents in New York City sent its wards to places like Sylvester Lusk's farm in Enfield, Connecticut. Lusk took boys to learn "the trade and mystery of farming" and girls to learn "the trade and mystery of housewifery." In commutation for "sufficient Meat, Beverage, Apparel, Lodging, and Washing, plumbing fixtures for an Apprentice," and a rudimentary instruction, the apprentices promised obedience, morality, and loyalty. Poor children also establish work in factories such as Samuel Slater'due south textile mills in southern New England. Slater published a newspaper advertisement for "four or v active Lads, about 15 Years of Age to serve equally Apprentices in the Cotton wool Factory."

And so, during the early-nineteenth century, opportunities for instruction and employment frequently depended on a given family's class. In colonial America, nearly all children worked within their parent's chosen profession, whether information technology be agricultural or artisanal. During the market revolution, however, more children were able to postpone employment. Americans aspired to provide a Romantic Childhood—a flow in which boys and girls were sheltered within the home and nurtured through principal schooling. This ideal was available to families that could survive without their children's labor. And every bit such sheltered boys and girls matured, their early experiences often adamant whether they entered respectable, well-paying positions or remained as dependent workers with little prospects for social mobility.

Only as children were expected to be sheltered from the developed world of work, American civilization expected men and women to assume distinct gender roles every bit they prepared for marriage and family life. An credo of "separate spheres" set the public realm—the globe of economic product and political life—autonomously as a male person domain, and the world of consumers and domestic life as a female person one. (Even non-working women labored by shopping for the household, producing food and vesture, cleaning, educating children, and performing similar activities. But these were considered "domestic" because they did non bring coin into the household, although they too were essential to the household'southward economic viability.) While reality muddied the platonic, the divide betwixt a private, female earth of home and a public, male globe of business divers American gender hierarchy.

The idea of divide spheres also displayed a distinct form bias. Middle- and upper-classes reinforced their status by shielding "their" women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be mothers and educators, not partners in production. Simply lower-course women connected to contribute direct to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was only feasible in households where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in wage labor as manufacturing plant workers, piece-workers producing items for market consumption, tavern and inn keepers, and domestic servants. While many of the key tasks women performed remained the same—producing wear, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors—the fundamental difference was whether and when they performed these tasks for cash in a market economy.

Domestic expectations constantly changed and the market revolution transformed many women'southward traditional domestic tasks. Cloth production, for example, advanced throughout the market revolution equally new mechanized production increased the volume and diverseness of fabrics bachelor to ordinary people. This relieved many better-off women of a traditional labor obligation. Every bit fabric production became commercialized, women's habitation-based fabric production became less important to household economies. Purchasing fabric, and later on, set up-fabricated clothes, began to transform women from producers to consumers. I woman from Maine, Martha Ballard, regularly referenced spinning, weaving, and knitting in the diary she kept from 1785 to 1812. Martha, her daughters, and female person neighbors spun and plied linen and woolen yarns and used them to produce a diversity of fabrics to make wear for her family unit. The production of cloth and clothing was a year-round, labor-intensive process, but it was for habitation consumption, not commercial markets.

In cities, where women could buy cheap imported cloth to turn into habiliment, they became skilled consumers. They stewarded their husbands' money by comparison values and haggling over prices. In one typical feel, Mrs. Peter Simon, a captain'south wife, inspected twenty-six yards of Holland cloth to ensure it was worth the £130 price. Even wealthy women shopped for high-value goods. While servants or slaves routinely fabricated depression-value purchases, the mistress of the household trusted her discriminating eye alone for expensive or specific purchases.

Women might also parlay their feminine skills into businesses. In improver to working every bit seamstresses, milliners, or laundresses, women might undertake paid work for neighbors or acquaintances or combine clothing production with management of a boarding house. Fifty-fifty slaves with particular skill at producing clothing could exist hired out for a college price, or might even negotiate to piece of work function-time for themselves. Most slaves, yet, continued to produce domestic items, including simpler cloths and clothing, for home consumption.

Thomas Horner, "Broadway, New York," 1836.

Like domestic expectations played out in the slave states. Enslaved women labored in the fields. Whites argued that African American women were less delicate and womanly than white women and therefore perfectly suited for agronomical labor. The southern ideal meanwhile established that white plantation mistresses were shielded from manual labor considering of their very whiteness. Throughout the slave states, all the same, aside from the minority of plantations with dozens of slates, the bulk of white women by necessity connected to assist with planting, harvesting, and processing agricultural projects despite the cultural stigma fastened to information technology. White southerners continued to produce large portions of their food and clothing at home. Even when they were market-oriented producers of cash crops, white southerners still insisted that their adherence to plantation slavery and racial hierarchy made them morally superior to greedy Northerners and their callous, cutthroat commerce. Southerners and northerners increasingly saw their means of life equally incompatible.

While the market revolution remade many women's economical roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged. Upon spousal relationship, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture, the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. Without special precautions or interventions, women could not earn their ain money, ain their ain property, sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by police force to their husbands. Women shopped on their husbands' credit and at whatsoever time husbands could terminate their wives' access to their credit. Although a scattering of states fabricated divorce available—divorce had before simply been legal in Congregationalist states such equally Massachusetts and Connecticut, where marriage was strictly a civil contract, rather than a religious one—it remained extremely expensive, difficult, and rare. Matrimony was typically a permanently bounden legal contract.

Ideas of marriage, if non the legal realities, began to modify. This period marked the start of the shift from "institutional" to "companionate" marriage. Institutional marriages were primarily labor arrangements that maximized the couple's and their children's chances of surviving and thriving. Men and women assessed each other'southward skills equally they related to household product, although looks and personality certainly entered into the equation. Only in the late-eighteenth century, under the influence past Enlightenment thought, immature people began to privilege character and compatibility in their potential partners. Money was nevertheless essential: marriages prompted the largest redistributions of property prior to the settling of estates at death. But the means of this redistribution was changing. Especially in the North, land became a less important foundation for matchmaking equally wealthy young men became not only farmers and merchants but bankers, clerks, or professionals. The increased emphasis on affection and allure that young people embraced was facilitated past an increasingly complex economy that offered new ways to shop, move, and create wealth, which liberalized the criteria by which families evaluated potential in-laws.

To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to ain a comfortable domicile and to ally a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-form husband and wife would be conspicuously delineated into carve up spheres. The married man alone was responsible for creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics—the public sphere. The married woman was responsible for the private—keeping a good home, being conscientious with household expenses, raising children, and inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their futurity success. Just for poor families, sacrificing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an impossibility.

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