12.5: A New Social Order

A. Wealth and Class

1. The market revolution ended the natural fixed social order that previously existed. The market revolution created a social order with class mobility.

2. The upper class stayed about the same, while the “middling sorts” grew rapidly.

3. Religion helped shape the new attitudes. 4. The middle class also changed their attitudes by:

a. emphasizing sobriety and steadinessb. removing themselves from the boisterous sociability of

the working class.

B. Religion and Personal Life

1. The Second Great Awakening moved from the frontier to the new market towns stressing salvation through personal faith.

2. Preachers such as Charles G. Finney urged businessmen to convert and accept the self-discipline and individualism that religion brought.

3. Evangelism became the religion of the new middle class.

C. The New Middle-Class Family

1. Middle-class women managed their homes and provided a safe haven for their husbands.

2. Attitudes about appropriate male and female roles and qualities hardened.

3. Men were seen as steady, industrious, and responsible; women as nurturing, gentle, and moral.

4. The popularity of housekeeping guides underscored the radical changes occurring in middle-class families.

In the 1840s, Edward Hicks painted his childhood home, rendering an idealized image of rural harmony that owes more to faith in republican agrarianism than to the artist’s accurate memory. The prosperous preindustrial farm depicted was similar to the Springers’ farm described in the text in its mixed yield—sheep, cattle, dairy products, and field crops—and its employment of an African American farm worker, shown plowing.

Every small community had artisans such as blacksmiths and wheelwrights, who did such essential work as shoeing horses and mending wagons for local farmers. Artist John Neagle’s heroic image of the blacksmith Pat Lyon, presents him as the very model of honest industry. SOURCE:John Neagle,Pat Lyon at the Forge. Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

This middle class family group, painted in 1840, illustrates the new importance of children, and at the mother-child bond.

D. Family Limitation

1. Middle-class couples limited their family size through birth control, abstinence, and abortion.

2. Physicians urged that sexual impulses be controlled, particularly among women whom they presumed to possess superior morality.

E. Middle-Class Children

1. New views of motherhood emerged as women were seen as primarily responsible for training their children in self-discipline.

2. Women formed networks and read advice magazines to help them in these tasks.

3. Mothers made contacts that would contribute to their children’s latter development. Children also prolonged their education and professional training.

4. A man’s success was very much the result of his family’s efforts.

F. Sentimentalism

1. The competitive spirit led many Americans to turn to sentimentalism and nostalgia.

2. Publishers found a lucrative market for novels of this genre, especially those written by women.

3. Sentimentalism became more concerned with maintaining social codes.

G. Transcendentalism and Self-Reliance

1. The intellectual reassurance for middle-class morality came from writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

2. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller emphasized individualism and communion with nature.