CONTENT GUIDE

Changing Structure of Family Life

The ideological base of the American Revolution affected family life as women took on new responsibilities as “Republican Mothers,” benefiting from increased educational opportunities, expanding their social and moral authority and focusing on the domestic sphere. Their marriages became more compassionate, and their families more child-centered. In addition, the economic changes of the early 19th century precipitated changes in the social lives of all kinds of people. An emerging disparity in socioeconomic conditions led to growing class-consciousness. Separation between the roles of men and women fostered a new concept of the family. New employment opportunities allowed  individuals to take on an unprecedented independence and importance. Increasing numbers of immigrants came to the United States looking for jobs and new lives. All of these changes led to changes in the structure of family life and the roles of women. Particularly noteworthy is that these changes had very different impacts on women depending on their marital status, their social class, family income, cultural and ethnic background, rural or urban residence and region of the country.

19th-century Social Changes: Development of the “Women’s Sphere”

As the century wore on, these changes accelerated and their impact on families intensified. Economic factors associated with the industrial revolution and ideological factors resulting from the War for Independence initially drove the separation in men’s and women’s spheres. Middle-class men and women fulfilled different roles. The ideal of “True Womanhood” defined women as pure, pious, submissive and domestic. Men belonged to the public world and were defined as strong, powerful, influential and potentially immoral. Family values, based on different gender roles, became part of middle-class life. This educated, literate elite dictated and spread social values through publications containing articles on childrearing, household management as well as entertaining fiction. While the economic arrangements of the middle-class were largely immaterial to working class families where the men could not possibly support their wives and children on their meager wages, middle-class values had an impact on the aspirations of those moving up into the middle class and on the overall social values of Americans. The elite’s shift toward a more genteel lifestyle, beginning in the 18th century, became the basis for more generalized guidelines for respectability observed by virtually all classes by the mid-19th century. Expanding consumerism resulted from availability of manufactured items, formerly produced by hand, and increasing affluence among the middle and upper classes.

19th-Century Industrialization: Middle-Class Women

One of the most influential events of the early 19th century was the development and spread of industry and its resulting economic impact on family life.

Beginning with the industrialization of textile manufacture in New England in the 1790s, industrialization had an unprecedented impact on the way people worked, what they did to earn their livings and how families functioned. Some of the larger consequences of industrialization were the growth of cities, improved transportation and commerce and movement of production out of homes and workshops and into mills. Initially these changes took place within the framework established by colonial families, but as time went on the old structures of family life gave way to a new model, exemplified mostly clearly among the emerging middle class.   In other words, the household mode of production, wherein people lived and worked at home, gave way to an industrial model that removed husbands from the household during working hours.

The “separation of spheres” between men’s and women’s roles became the differences between public and private, the workplace and home and the immoral and the moral. Enlarging on the ideological role of “Republican Motherhood” women’s authority in moral, educational and domestic matters expanded. Their economic power virtually disappeared as they became removed, not only from production, but from earning power as well. Women’s work within their homes became “invisible” because it was not paid work. The domestic ideal also formed the foundation for women’s later public influence in reform movements, abolition and eventually women’s rights. The sanctity of the home and family were so important that it formed the rationale for women’s involvement in a multitude of public causes, while at the same time honing their organizational skills. Middle-class women, whose financial security was assured by their husbands’ salaries, eventually came to dominate these movements.

Working Class, Poor and Rural Women

For working-class and poorer women, the necessity for remaining home with young children was managed by taking in outwork, laundry or boarders. These women continued to fulfill all of the household demands for cooking, cleaning, sewing and child care, while supplementing their husbands’ inadequate wages. Home became the workplace for these women, even though ostensibly they conformed to the middle-class model of wives remaining in the private sphere while their husbands worked in the public sphere.

While the economic benefits of the Industrial Revolution, combined with the middle class’s growing consumer needs, fueled a more affluent lifestyle for some, immigrant workers and poor rural and urban families benefited only marginally. Increasing opportunities for employment in wage labor changed the function of the typical household from a unit of production to a unit of redistribution and consumption. For probably the first time in American history some individuals might realistically expect to make their own living and live separately, as opposed to being part of a household. Spinsters were able to support themselves by teaching, millwork or domestic service. Single men and apprentices no longer lived as part of their employers’ households, but boarded elsewhere.

Rural women continued to work with their fathers, husbands and sons to support their households, but there were changes even on the farms. Farming in the East was becoming more commercialized and specialized in response to the demands of urban markets. The contributions of farm women also responded to market pressures. In the Middle Atlantic States, rural women concentrated their efforts on production of dairy products, such as butter and eggs, which they sold at local markets. In New England rural women entered into the industrial process by performing “outwork” in their homes when not attending to other responsibilities of farming life. They were paid for the outwork, making palm leaf hats or bonnets or weaving cloth, but their earnings continued to supplement the family coffers, rather than be used for personal discretionary uses. New England farm families sent their daughters to work in the burgeoning textile mills at Lowell, Massachusetts and elsewhere. These young women worked for wages, thereby augmenting their families’ cash earnings, while at the same time developing a new sense of independence among themselves. Even for unmarried daughters, who lived and worked at textile mills in urban areas, responsibility to their families continued to be a priority. Some used the money they earned to pay for new clothes or educational expenses, but many sent money home or saved for their eventual marriages. Outwork and temporary employment in the mills served as transitional means of entering the newly created world of wage labor.

The Changing Sphere of Domesticity

In the 19th century women’s roles became more focused on their homes and families. This specialization extended their influence in moral and educational activities, while at the same time reducing the economic power of most middle-class women. Concurrently, concerns for the sanctity of their homes and families took many middle-class women outside the prescribed sphere of domesticity. Religious and charitable activities extended their influence in public life and equipped them with new organizational skills. Technological developments facilitated expanding job opportunities for women, although these opportunities were largely limited to young single women who worked before marriage. Respectable married women, regardless of class, did not work outside their homes. Therefore, married women who had to help support their families financially found ways to work for money at home. Working class women, rural women, women of color and western migrants faced different problems and had different priorities than those of the more affluent urban classes.

African American Families

Women of non-European backgrounds had the most difficult time of all. Slave women were required to work all day for their masters, relegating family needs and duties to the nighttime. These family ties, however, formed the nucleus of African-American cohesion and resistance to the injustices and cruelties of slavery. Free black women in both North and South were consigned to the very lowest paying jobs whether they worked in other people’s homes, or in their own doing laundry or cooking for employers, and their families. The abysmal employment rate and pay scales for free black men meant that families could not survive on a husband’s earnings.

Civil War and Status of Women

Analogies between the circumstances of enslaved blacks and women in general fostered parallel concerns about the unequal legal status of all women. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 offered the first organized demonstration of women’s new-found political consciousness. These considerations were muted or different for white women in the South, enslaved African Americans and the urban working poor, however. The southern planter class’s dependence on the institution of slavery, the physical oppression of slave women, and concerns about family support and welfare among the poor led these women to hold different priorities and goals than those of northern middle-class white women. The events leading to the Civil War galvanized women regardless of affiliation with North or South to support their respective causes.

The Civil War

By mid-century political changes deeply affected family life. After festering for years the conflict over states’ rights and slavery erupted and nearly tore the nation in two. As had their ancestors during the American Revolution, women rallied to the cause on both sides and often shouldered jobs that they had not done previously. Northern women set the cause of women’s rights aside during the war, devoting themselves instead to nursing, a new occupation for women, and sewing for the troops. The war brought tremendous hardship, especially to southern women, both black and white. Many women on both sides lost husbands, sons and lovers resulting in a generation of widows and unmarried women. Other women’s husbands returned wounded and unable to work. After the war many women tried to find means to support themselves and their children, not because they wanted to be financially independent, but because they wanted to eat.

Following the Civil War, great numbers of emancipated black families left the South in search of greater opportunities in the factories and cities of the North and Midwest. Native American women from Southeastern tribes suffered the loss of their homelands and their traditional authority in society as they were “educated” to European gender expectations on distant reservations. The final efforts of western tribes to remain independent were undermined by the contraction of their economic base, i.e., hunting, long before they were finally subdued and confined to reservations.

Immigrants and Urban Life

Another result of the war as increased industrialization. Immigrants flooded United States cities looking for work. For urban dwellers, 19th century changes were more substantial and represented greater differences from previous lifestyles. For the most disadvantaged women, however, even a facade of the middle-class separation of spheres was not possible. Immigrants found that lifestyles that had sustained them in the Old World were not always possible in the New.

Immigration provided new workers for American mills but exacerbated social divisions originating in differences in cultural background, class, religion, economic class and language. Many recently arrived immigrant women helped to support their families through employment in the mills, as seamstresses and domestic servants in middle-class homes. For many of the single Irish immigrant women, family support meant passage money sent to parents and siblings in Ireland, rather than contributing to the support of husbands and children in America. Many of these women chose to forgo marriage altogether, forming a pattern of single women whose energies were devoted to their siblings’ families, charities and the Catholic church. Native-born American women and immigrant women found themselves competing for the same jobs. The result was increasing pressure to lower wages and lengthen hours and the eventual exodus of many native-born women from millwork entirely. Domestic service, scorned by many native-born American women, provided opportunities for Irish women, used to hard work and eager for wages. Prejudice against “Irish girls” made life difficult and humiliating for many of them. Among desperately poor women sometimes “street walking” was the only solution.

Conclusions

The 19th century is an era about which it is difficult to make generalizations. Broad statements about “women” and “men” have little or no meaning without reference to the specific group of people under discussion. The roles of women depended heavily on who they were socially, how much their household income was, and what their cultural and ethnic background was. Even among “working women” these factors had great impact on what types of work were available to them, how much they could expect to make and how they might be treated by their employers. Again, women cannot be viewed separately from their families and the men in their lives. Family status continued to depend heavily on husbands’ status, particularly for urban upper- and middle-class women and for rural farm women. For poorer women, the fact that their husbands were often consigned to the least lucrative jobs available relegated them to lives of hardship rather than that of the middle-class ideal.

Family structure was also dependent on social, economic and cultural factors. Middle- and upper-class children could expect to enjoy a childhood devoted to learning and play. Parents of these children had changed their methods of discipline to gentle reasoning and guidance in place of corporal punishment commonly used in many colonial families. In contrast, the children of poorer households were expected to contribute to their families’ meager incomes through millwork, odd jobs, agricultural labor, or helping their mothers with piecework, often out of necessity and by neglecting any chance for schooling.

Relationships between spouses also reflected the expectations of class, culture and circumstance. Many Irish immigrant wives faced the problems of alcoholic husbands, a problem exacerbated by grinding poverty and the erosion of traditional Irish gender relationships. Middle-class women resorted to close female friendships to fill the emotional vacancies left when attentive suitors became physically and emotionally distant husbands. Lonely women on the frontier longed for families and friends left behind, while trying to bring order to disorderly conditions, and perhaps resenting the husbands who had dictated the move West. Black slave women suffered under the rampant sexual license exercised by white masters, while their husbands watched helplessly. Southern women faced another sort of humiliation while trying to ignore the children of mixed heritage growing up in the slave quarters. Relationships between spouses hardly fit any one convenient model, despite the growing literature on companionate marriages and affectionate family relationships.

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