1. Elizabeth H. Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 22 October 1851. While some historians have found similar complexity in the early nineteenth century (e.g., Laurel Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale ) and mid-nineteenth century (e.g., Christine Stansell, City of Women ), the theoretical framing of the period does not reflect their findings.

2. Minerva Mayo Autobiography, 1 January 1820.

3. Property holdings discussed here are as reported in the 1850 manuscript census. I was able to identify the census records of all but 9% of the diarists I knew to be still alive and living in New England in 1850. See Appendix B.

The mean property valuation of $978 (the median is $800) is consistent with Thomas Dublin's computations in Women at Work , his study of the social origins of female textile operatives. Dublin found that the median property holdings of millhands' fathers in 1850 was $960, slightly less than the median of $998 owned by other male heads of households of similar ages in the towns and villages where the fathers lived (p. 35). As another point of comparison, the average farm in Massachusetts in 1850 was worth $3,296 and included 99 acres (DeBow, Statistical View of the United States, Seventh Census, 1850 , p. 169).

The reliability of the federal census is a subject of great dispute. But census data, despite limitations and distortions, have proven valuable, along with town histories, vital records, genealogies, and probate records, in supplementing the base of evidence for this book. Censuses before 1850 did not record property holdings and did not enumerate the names of household members.

The ''winds of circumstance" quotation is from the Leonard M. Stockwell Memorial, ca. 1880, p. 5.

4. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 25 August 1854, 8 January 1853.

5. I elaborate the problems with this formulation below, in the section of this chapter dealing with "Middle-Class Ideology and Separate Spheres."

6. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 8 January 1853; Doug McAdam, "Gender Implications of the Traditional Academic Conception of the Political," p. 61.

7. For example, Clarke E. Cochran, Religion in Public and Private Life ; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman ; Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ; Barrington Moore Jr., Privacy ; Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History ; Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy"; Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, "Justice: On Relating Private and Public"; Rayna R. Reiter, ''Men and Women in the South of France: Public and Private Domains"; Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, "Woman, Culture and Society"; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public ; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man ; Dorothy Smith, "Women, the Family, and Corporate Capitalism"; Susan Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family ; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought ; Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center ; Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere"; Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History ; and Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory .

8. Brigham Nims Diary, 30 April 1845. My thanks to Susan Ostrander for bringing the W. I. Thomas parallel to my attention. For example, Lizzie Goodenough wrote in her diary: "Mr. Howe has gone to town meeting today. It has been very still about the place. Not a man on the farm this afternoon" (7 March 1865). In contrast, the account in Sarah Beacham's diary does not specify what genders participated in the meeting: "Town meeting rages so that we don't work in the mills" (10 March 1863).

9. For a contemporary overview of these debates, see Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory . Some scholars have characterized behavior that does not fit neatly into either sphere as occurring in an "intermediate realm," a "third place," or a "free space." See, for example, Ray Oldenberg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day (New York: Paragon House, 1989). In Oldenberg's romanticized vision, cafes, beauty parlors, and the like serve a central integrative function in society. Similarly, Harry C. Boyte and Sara M. Evans identify "free spaces" for conversation and political organizing ( Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America ).

Other observers consider everyday social intercourse a marginal activity in society, relegated to an inconsequential realm between public and private. Alan Wolfe has criticized this perspective in his discussion of the decline of sociology. He says that with the ascendance of economics and political science, scholars increasingly assume that either the market or the state organizes social relations. In fact, an independent type of interaction transpires among people in groups and communities, outside the market or the state ( Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation , p. 20). Wolfe makes a distinction between the state, the market, and what he calls civil society or "the intimate sphere," the realm that includes family life. He optimistically assesses the capacity of civil society, which he sees as mediating between individualism and collectivism, between culture and the market, though he recognizes that civil society is not a premodern organic community and that it operates under principles of exclusion as well as inclusion: "Even when relations in civil society are based on reciprocity and altruism, they can satisfy obligations to immediate group members to the exclusion of obligations to strangers and hypothetical others" (p. 18).

10. A similar argument is made by Nancy F. Cott regarding women's sphere in the early republic and the preconditions for the women's rights movement. In Bonds of Womanhood , she claims that the separation of men from women cultivated a "unique sexual solidarity" that feminism built upon when organizing for social change (p. 201).

My use of the term the social contrasts sharply with Hannah Arendt's. Her basic referent for "society" is the salon of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Germany. She views high society as corrupting and characterized by a menacing imperative to conform, extinguishing the distinctiveness and initiative which characterize the public: "Society. expects from each of its members a certain kind of behavior, imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to 'normalize' its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement" ( The Human Condition , p. 40).

Arendt maintains that although the important separation between social and public sometimes blurs, the social must be shunted aside for public space to emerge. She sees the social as erasing individuality, the essence of which is necessary for the public to thrive. While she analytically distinguishes the social, she disdains the banal activities that constitute its center. In her privileging of political action, she argues that the concerns of everyday life—social equality and labor, "mindless, routinized, and repetitious"—should not preoccupy noble individuals or governments because they fail to elevate human beings above their animal origins.

Arendt sees the social encroaching upon and subsuming both the public and the private, ultimately to the detriment of both. For Arendt, the social embodies the economic in addition to other things, miring it in everyday life-maintenance activities that "are by definition opposed to freedom and the capacity for action" (Pitkin, "Justice," p. 334). Therefore, in her scheme, the social and the political work in direct opposition to one another. As Bhikhu Parekh puts it, for Arendt, "civic consciousness is not the basis but the product of political consciousness" ( Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy , p. 136).

11. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , p. 154. There are many competing conceptions of the private, as with civil society and the public. In a useful taxonomy, in "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction," Jeff Weintraub looks at four general theoretical perspectives that define private variously as the market economy (liberal economic approaches), the household (Aristotle's conception), the family (Marxist feminism), or domesticity (Aries's approach).

12. I do not mean to imply that the state is not social in a larger sense, because it is. Again, there are many alternative conceptions of the state. For example, Weintraub (ibid.) points to the parallel definitions of public as government (liberal economic); political community (Aristotle); the economy (Marxist feminism); and sociability (Aries). For Fraser, a public is decidedly "not the state; it is rather the informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion that can serve as a counterweight to the state" (Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," p. 75). Rather than conceive of one overarching public, Fraser contends that "an egalitarian, multi-cultural society only makes sense if we suppose a plurality of public arenas in which groups with diverse values and rhetorics participate" (p. 69). Thus the public sphere is a place to negotiate cultural and political difference.

13. Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics; p. 622. Feminists have consistently made this point throughout the second wave of feminism. Baker's definition locates politics in attempts to change social structures, and as such falls between an extremely broad conception, such as that of Joan Scott, and a more traditional conception of politics. Scott defines politics as "the process by which plays of power and knowledge constitute identity and experience" ( Gender and the Politics of History , p. 5). In contrast, McAdam defines politics as "something that takes place in public domains between officially recognized political actors" ("Gender Implications of the Traditional Academic Conception of the Political," p. 61). Activities can also be spiritualized or, as Fraser points out, personalized, familialized, economized, or none of the above (Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere'').

14. See Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy , for a discussion of the political processes that occur outside formal political events.

15. Ostrander, "Feminism, Voluntarism, and the Welfare State," p. 34; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class .

16. There were sister organizations in other cities, but this particular example relates to the New York City chapter. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman: A Case Study in Sex Roles and Social Stress in Jacksonian America," in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America , p. 110. For moral reform activities in upstate New York, see Mary P. Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America." For further discussion of women's activism outside the home in defense of it, which has again become a pattern of the contemporary debate on the role of women in families and society, see especially research on moral reform, Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast and the Militant Woman"; on religious movements, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class ; and on suffrage activities, Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

17. Smith-Rosenberg, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman," p. 117.

18. Leon E Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery , p. 267. Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850 , ch. 6. William J. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown , p. 126.

19. It is interesting that the British transition to capitalism did not involve the same process. Families , not individual workers, entered the textile factories. So while work and home separated, work and family did not, at least until later. See Neil J. Smelser, Social Change in the Industrial Revolution ; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the U.S., Colonial Times to 1970 . Nancy Cott uses the term "employments" in Bonds of Womanhood , her study of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century America. On millworkers manipulating their work environment, see Dublin, Women at Work .

20. Richard M. Bernard and Maris A. Vinovskis, "The Female School Teacher in Ante-Bellum Massachusetts; p. 333.

21. In the United States, women became the first industrial proletariat. Alice Kessler-Harris states that women constituted 65% of New England's industrial labor force in 1840. Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States , p. 48. Thomas Dublin finds that in 1836 women constituted more than 85% of the work force in the Hamilton Company mills in Lowell, Massachusetts ( Women at Work , p. 26). Dublin finds that textile mill operatives energetically approached their factory work and set limits on their family obligations. The corporate planners in Lowell instituted a scheme to ensure the virtue (i.e., virginity) of its factory workers and to reassure millgirls' families of their safety. Their explicit intent was to control the young women's behavior. They established a boardinghouse system in Lowell whereby most single workers lived in the company boardinghouses under the jurisdiction of a companyemployed housekeeper. The boardinghouses had strict rules for boarders (for example, a 10 p.m. curfew and mandatory attendance at church on Sunday). The boardinghousekeepers, who were touted as "surrogate parents; enforced the rules. They reinforced this system of control by keeping company blacklists of those who "misbehaved" morally or politically. For a full discussion, see Dublin, Women at Work, ch. 5.

22. Curry writes that "only in Boston, of the nation's fifteen largest cities, were free blacks entitled to vote on equal terms throughout the first half of the nineteenth century" ( The Free Black in Urban America , p. 88). Leon E Litwack writes that by 1840, "only in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine could Negroes vote on an equal basis with whites" ( North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 , p. 75), but he points out that racist actions in New England attempted to keep black voters from the polls (p. 92). John Hope Franklin, "Quasi-Free," Stanford Lawyer (Spring/Summer 1989): 47. The Fugitive Slave Law basically allowed charges that an African American was an escaped slave even if no proof was available. According to Herbert Aptheker, African Americans were no longer guaranteed a trial by jury, confrontation with witnesses, or the assumption of innocence ( Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement , p. 115). This situation left all blacks vulnerable to false identification, and many rightfully ''feared that the provisions of the act would be used to cloak extensive kidnaping of free blacks" (Curry, The Free Black in Urban America , p. 229). For an example of the response to the act, see Leonard W. Levy, "Sims Case: The Fugitive Slave Law in Boston in 1851." Ellen Carol DuBois, ed., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony: Correspondence, Writings, Speeches ; Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America ; Elizabeth Bowles Warbasse, The Changing Legal Rights of Married Women, 1800-1861 .

23. Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," p. 152; Mary P. Ryan, The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860 ; and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity .

24. Welter, "Cult of True Womanhood; p. 159. Cited in Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband; Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840 , p. 37. Ronald Preston Byars, The Making of the Self-Made Man: The Development of Masculine Roles and Images in Antebellum America , p. 197; E. Anthony Rotundo, "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900," p. 18; Byars, The Making of the Self-Made Man , pp. 36, 143-44; E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), p. 105.

25. Gerda Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson, 1800-1840," pp. 192-93, 190-91.

26. Ryan, Empire of Mother .

27. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 , p. 59.

28. Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present ; Karen Sacks, "Engels Revisited: Women, the Organization of Production, and Private Property," in Toward an Anthropology of Women , ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), pp. 211-34; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood ; Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women ; and Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct . Cott maintains that the distinct female culture provided fertile ground to nourish the early women's rights movement. Lise Vogel argues that this vein of feminist scholarship achieved hegemony in women's studies in the late 1970s through the 1980s, to the exclusion and retrospective erasure of competing perspectives that were informed by analytic categories such as class, racial difference, and exploitation ("Telling Tales: Historians of Our Own Lives").

29. John Mack Faragher, Women and Men on the Overland Trail ; Nancy Grey Osterud, "'She Helped Me Hay It as Good as a Man': Relations among Women and Men in an Agricultural Community," pp. 89, 91-92.

30. C. Dallett Hemphill, "'There is No Society Otherwise': Men, Women, and Manners in Antebellum America," and Laura McCall, "Gender in Fiction: The Creations of Literary Men and Women," both papers presented at the Social Science History Association Meetings, New Orleans, Louisiana, October, 1991. Also see C. Dallett Hemphill, Manners for Americans: Interaction Ritual and the Social Order, 1620-1860 (Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 1987). Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , p. 191.

31. Linda K. Kerber, Nancy F. Cott, Robert Gross, Lynn Hunt, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Christine M. Stansell, "Beyond Roles, Beyond Spheres: Thinking about Gender in the Early Republic," pp. 566, 565, 568.

32. For example, Mary Blewett found that when married women in the New England shoe industry had the option to stop working, they did: "In developing and living the dual model of working girl and homebound wife, working women actively helped to create a sense of proper gender relationships within the new economic system and redefined the ideology of early nineteenth-century domesticity in accordance with their own class experience" ("Women Shoeworkers and Domestic Ideology: Rural Outwork in Early Nineteenth Century Essex County"). In contrast, Mary Ryan in Cradle of the Middle Class questions the degree to which notions of true womanhood affected even middle-class white women. In addition, the growing population of single white middle-class women developed a competing ideology of their own, the "Cult of Single Blessedness," according to Chambers-Schiller. This cultural ideal recommended that women expand their intellectual horizons, develop self-knowledge, cultivate their autonomy, and dedicate their lives to public service. Women's domestic role was rejected, in favor of independence and vocational accomplishment. Liberty, a Better Husband , pp. 206-7.

33. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist , p. 30. Collins, Black Feminist Thought ; Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class ; Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America ; and Bell Hooks, Feminist Theory .

34. Lerner, "The Lady and the Mill Girl," p. 191; Marjorie Ruzich Abel, "Profiles of Nineteenth Century Working Women"; Blewett, "Women Shoeworkers and Domestic Ideology"; Lise Vogel, "'Humorous Incidents and Sound Common Sense': More on the New England Mill Women," p. 282.

35. JoAnne Preston, "Millgirl Narratives: Representations of Class and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Lowell," p. 21; Adaline Shaw to Daniel Shaw, Esq., SSC, 28 May 1848.

36. First and foremost, for the workers as well as the factory owners, this image had to combat that of the English textile workers, who were universally seen as a downtrodden, oppressed group. The Lowell Offering was supported and partially financed by the factory owners, and its message must be read with that in mind. Preston, "Millgirl Narratives," p. 25. As Preston puts it (p. 28), "In their writings, the women created a view of themselves which defied the negative conception of the industrial worker and the restrictive ideology of the lady."

37. JoAnne Preston, "Female Aspiration and Male Ideology: School-Teaching in Nineteenth-Century New England."

38. Sarah Trask Diary, 3 April 1849, emphasis added. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, July 1854. The poem was titled "Woman's Duties" (ibid., 4 December 1858). For further discussion of "old maids; see Preston, "Millgirl Narratives;' and Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband .

39. Hannah T., Mary, and Margaret Adams to Mother, 23 March 1842, Adams Family Papers.

40. Historically, observers of society have consistently witnessed a division of labor based on gender. That said, the specific tasks performed by and deemed appropriate for men and women have varied by culture, historical period, and circumstance. Furthermore, scholars have cited times of labor shortage, such as planting or harvest, as moments when traditions could be abandoned. In her review of American household work practices over two centuries, Ruth Schwartz Cowan notes that both men and women sewed, but they sewed different items. If the fabric was leather, for instance, it became the man's task. While men supposedly performed chores that required great strength, women washed clothes and made soap, which demanded enormous physical stamina ( More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave ).

John Mack Faragher, in Women and Men on the Overland Trail , finds that midwestern farms in the mid-nineteenth century had a fairly rigid division of labor, with little overlap between men's and women's work. However, the situation he researches is one of extreme hardship, and given the need for maximum adaptability on the frontier, the rigid rules he describes regarding the division of labor are not adequately explained. In contrast, Osterud finds that while men and women were responsible for specific tasks in Nanticoke Valley, New York, the division of labor was flexible depending on a combination of choice and necessity (" 'She Helped Me Hay It as Good as a Man;" pp. 87-97).

41. Elizabeth Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, 15 June 1857, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters (emphasis in original); Unknown Woman Diary (ms. #86), 30 May 1859; Horatio Chandler Diary, 22 June 1840; John Plummer Foster Diary, 10 January 1859. The machine must have been quite rudimentary. But new technologies have often marked turning points in the division of labor in the factory—why not in the household? Thereafter, in the Foster household washing on Monday seemed to be John's job. Brigham Nims Diary, 12 August 1853 and 29 August 1843.

42. Only a few men performed these chores routinely. The work continued to be largely women's work, which points the analysis to a gendered division of labor but not a strict culture of separate spheres.

43. Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York .

1. For assessment of current issues within historical sociology, see Andrew Abbott, "History and Sociology: The Lost Synthesis," and Charles Tilly, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons .

2. I begin this comparison with the hypothesis that the working people's practices differed from those of the middle class. I expect this was more true in the urban context than in the rural, where citizens of all ranks mingled with greater familiarity and shared culture. In small towns and villages of New England up through the 1840s, the vast majority of people were white, spoke English as their first language, belonged to Protestant churches, attended the same elementary schools, and assumed the rights and entitlements that accompanied U.S. citizenship. In these environments, middle-class people mingled more extensively with working men and women than in cities. For a discussion of this point for a slightly later period, see John Meyer, David Tyack, Joane Nagel and Audri Gordon, "Public Education as Nation-Building in America: Enrollments and Bureaucratization in the American States, 1870-1930."

3. DeBow, Seventh Census, 1850 , pp. 2-77. Free blacks constituted a somewhat higher proportion of the population of some cities: 1.46% in Boston and 3.61% in Providence, Rhode Island. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America , p. 246.

4. Many scholars would comfortably describe my subjects as the "middling sort." For example, Cott makes the distinction between middle-class and upper-middle-class women in her sample of diarists. About the subjects in the middleclass group she says: "Those women worked. While unmarried, they engaged in school teaching, domestic work, handicraft and industrial labor" ( Bonds of Womanhood , p. 9). In my opinion, not differentiating between domestic workers and women who work in the household as wives of professional men is a grave mistake. For example, one of the diarists studied by Cott is Paulina Bascom Williams, whom Cott appears to include among her middle-class subjects. But Williams, though married to a minister, was anything but comfortably situated; she wrote about her lack of decent clothing and many hardships she and her family endured. On December 6, 1831, she reported on her arrival at a recently built parsonage: "We have no cow & are out of provisions of every kind, & now whether it is our duty to stay in such a place after such indignity without cause or provocation is a doubt that remains to be solved. Would the Saviour have tarried with disciples that treated him thus! I certainly need a great measure of grace that my mouth may not utter perverseness."

For a discussion of the inadequacies of these attempts to conceptualize class, see Michael B. Katz, "Social Class in North American Urban History." Marx's categories of working class and petit bourgeoisie seem too narrow and inflexible to describe the weavers and farmers of this study, and C. Wright Mills's "old middle class" insufficiently discriminates between those who had to labor by their own hands in order to make a living and those who did not. In his influential Chants Democratic , Sean Wilentz argues that definitions and categories of class are too economically deterministic, making them fixed, flat, insensitive to historical specificity, and lacking in explanatory power (p. 7). Wilentz therefore proposes that we study the emergence of the working class as a process, constructed through human relationships, "part of a human achievement in which men and women struggle to comprehend the social relations into which they were born (or entered involuntarily) and in which, by the collective exercise of power, they sustain or challenge those relations, in every phase of social life" (p. 10). But Wilentz's proposed method, despite its compelling logic, is difficult to replicate with my subjects. How does one understand the "human achievements" of a domestic worker who left to posterity nothing but a record of her daily activities? While her struggle to survive painfully surfaces and she may have clashed with her employer, she did not document her conflict with a "capitalist class.'' Nor did she engage in the "collective exercise of power." Where did this place her in the class structure? Where did she place herself? Ira Katznelson poses an alternative that does not require choosing between location in the class structure and self-definition as a member of a particular class ("Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons," pp. 3-41). These issues reveal the difficulty of applying class categories to individuals as opposed to aggregates of people.

Another complication results from attempting to analytically place farmers, especially poor farmers who owned their own land. The fate of farmers was intertwined with that of workers, as evidenced in legislation (the lot of workers was most likely to improve when a coalition of the two groups supported a campaign) and individual consciousness (witness organizations such as the "Committee of Farmers, Mechanics, and Other Working Men"). See Amy Bridges, "Becoming American: The Working Classes in the United States Before the Civil War," pp. 157-196.

5. I attempted to assess an individual's class status and available resources at the stage of his or her life as close as possible to the time of the diary-keeping or other writing. An example illustrates the importance of timing: David Clapp wrote his diary while he was a printer's apprentice in the 1820s. He later became a successful printer in Boston. His father owned three acres of land in Dorchester, which David inherited. By 1850, he owned $5,000 of property, enough to have excluded him from my study. But as a boy from the ages of fourteen to seventeen who was struggling to learn a trade and uncertain about his future, he fit my definition of a working person in the 1820s. I decided to include him in the study.

6. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 , p. 72. For a discussion of the changes in dress and the rancor they provoked, see Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 . Joan Acker forcefully argues that this is grounds for reconsidering the elements of a useful conception of class: "In order to strengthen the theoretical links between gender and class, the conceptualization of the social relations that underlie class divisions must be changed. One way to do this is to see class as rooted in relations of distribution (as well as in relations of production) that necessarily embed gender, both as ideology, and material inequality." ("Class, Gender, and the Relations of Distribution," p. 496). She says that in this way state transfer payments and the shared resources of a family wage are taken into account, as well as an individual's wages. However, she says that "the primary aim of class analysis is not to define bounded categories into which people fit, but to comprehend class formation" (p. 496). While I respect her intent, my object here is to locate individuals within the class system.

7. A decade later Brigham's and Mary's fortunes dramatically diverged. Mary married Philip Bryant, a cordwainer, in 1856 and continued to teach school. The 1860 census lists Philip as owning $1,500 worth of personal property and real estate. In 1853 Brigham married Susan Selina Gould and by 1860 had two children. His economic fortunes skyrocketed, and by 1860 he owned $5,500 worth of property, which included a building on Main Street in Keene, New Hampshire.

8. By 1840, free black property holders had the right to vote in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. They could vote in Rhode Island after 1842. Connecticut at one time allowed free blacks to vote, then revoked the right but did not reinstate it until 1869. Leon Litwack, North of Slavery , pp. 75, 80, and 92. Prior to the Civil War, African Americans were admitted as jurors only in Massachusetts (and then beginning only in 1860) (p. 94). However, Massachusetts prohibited interracial marriage until 1843, as did Rhode Island (pp. 105-6).

Brown, The Life of William J. Brown : "I could readily see that the people were determined not to instruct colored people in any art" (p. 102); "I soon found it was on account of my color, for no colored men except barbers had trades, and that could hardly be called a trade. The white people seemed to be combined against giving us any thing to do which would elevate us to a free and independent position" (p. 103). Willard B. Gatewood is quick to point out that some blacks in the African-American community had more status than others ( Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 ). In a table of the class structure of African Americans in mid-nineteenth-century Boston, James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton identify the professional class as including doctors, lawyers, ministers, music teachers, and schoolteachers ( Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North , p. 129). In terms of stratification within the black community, this classification might make sense, but in terms of the type of work and the income level relative to the white community, it does not. Charlotte Forten Grimke kept an elaborate journal off and on between 1854 and 1892. But because she came from an affluent and politically influential African-American family in Philadelphia, it would have been inappropriate for me to include her in this study. See Brenda Stevenson, ed., The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). James L. Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith , p. 192.

9. This was not categorically true. Particularly with the onset of the Civil War, men and women became more involved in politics, battlefield body counts, the draft, and presidential politics. That said, their everyday lives remained relatively unchanged.

10. As Victoria Bonnell points out, historical sources need cross-examination to ensure accuracy and authenticity—particularly large concerns in a historical study such as this one where evidence is generated from the vantage point of individuals who had no reason to be neutral. For a wonderful methodological discussion of the light these biases can shed, see Virginia Bernhard, "Cotton Mather's 'Most Unhappy Wife': Reflections on the Uses of Historical Evidence."

11. Leonard Stockwell Memorial, pp. 29-30.

12. In the 1840s, New England states began passing Married Women's Property Act legislation. These acts enabled women to own property independently after marrying, to own the wages they earned, to sue, to contract, and to write wills. For detailed information, see Warbasse, The Changing Legal Rights of Married Women , and Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America .

13. The will specified that Leonard's money should be put in a trust, paying only the interest to Leonard, and that after Leonard's death the principal should be distributed among his children, or brothers and sisters if he had no offspring. Will of Enoch Stockwell, no. 56270, Worcester County Probate Court Records, signed 28 November 1833.

14. Mills, The Sociological Imagination , p. 143. See the discussion about interpretation of women's life stories in Personal Narratives Group, "Origins," pp. 3-15.

15. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 1 February 1852.

16. Ibid., 22 October 1854. Martha's mother, Gertrude Barrett, is listed as the head of household in the 1850 census, owning $700 worth of real estate and personal property.

17. Ibid., 1 February 1852. Martha Osborne Barrett, volume of poetry, 1854 or 1855.

18. Martha Osborne Barrett, "Paper Read before the Ladies' Unitarian Association, PHS, 28 October 1892; "Order of Services on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Dedication of the First Unitarian Church, Peabody, Mass.," PHS, 26 July 1876; obituary, Salem News , 16 October 1905.

19. Louisa Chapman Diary, 3 February 1848.

20. Report of the School Committee of the Town of Danvers, 1848-49 , p. 23.

21. Sarah Trask Diary, 7 May 1849.

22. Joshua Trask, her brother, is listed as the head of household in the 1850 census, and as owning $800 worth of property. Neither Sarah nor her mother are listed as having independent resources.

23. Sarah Trask Diary, vol. 2, p. 54. For an excellent exploration of Sarah's diary and family history, see Mary H. Blewett, "'I am Doom to Disapointment': The Diaries of a Beverly, Massachusetts, Shoebinder, Sarah E. Trask, 1849-51."

24. Pollie Cathcart Tilton Diary, 11 July 1859.

25. Brigham Nims to Susan $elina Gould, Roxbury Town Records, NHSA, 1 August 1853, emphasis in the original.

26. Nims Obituary, June 5, 1893, Nims Family Association. It is important to keep in mind that his prominence was limited to a remote area of New Hampshire with a population of less than three hundred.

27. Brigham Nims to family, HSCC, 17 October 1832.

28. The South Boston Broadway Church was an Orthodox Congregational church. They were married by a female minister, Joy H. Fairchild. The 1840 census reveals Beal and family to be living in Groton, Massachusetts. Vital records do not reveal his whereabouts or his death. In 1848, Sarah Jane Beal married Charles $. Travers of Gardner, Massachusetts. In 1851, Sarah Jane Travers petitioned the court to transfer guardianship of her son to Abel Thurston of Fitchburg, due to feeble health. It is not clear why her new husband could not help care for him. Shortly thereafter Nathaniel Day became young Foster's new guardian; the court records no reason why Abel Thurston terminated his duties.

29. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 25 June 1861.

30. Ibid., 22 July 1861; March 1862.

31. Ibid., 30 August 1859.

32. Ibid., 16 November 1865.

33. Ibid., 24 May 1861.

34. Metcalf-Adams Family Papers: Charles Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, 10 July 1844; Elizabeth Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, 23 January 1848.

35. Ibid., Sarah Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, 28 March 1844, 25 September 1846, 31 May 1849.

36. Ibid., Mary Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, file III. 19, n.d.

37. JoAnne Preston, "Learning a Trade in Industrializing New England: The Expedition of Hannah and Mary Adams to Nashua, New Hampshire, 1833-1834."

38. Adams Family Papers: Hannah Adams to Mother and Father, 14 November 1841; Hannah, Mary, and Margaret Adams to Mother, 23 n.m. 1842.

39. Ibid., Eliza Adams to Brothers and Sisters, 26 November 1860.

40. Anne Abbott Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 17 November 1842, emphasis in original.

41. Mary Chandler Lowell, Old Foxcroft, Maine, Traditions and Memories , p. 152.

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., p. 180. Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family 17 September 1855.

1. Susan E. Parsons Brown Forbes Diary, 16 February 1841; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct ; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood . Other studies have found similar evidence of intense romance in friendships between middle- and upper-class women and inklings of it in the working class. Louise Berkinow, Among Women (New York: Harmony, 1980); Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, A Better Husband ; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present ; Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980). And for working-class friendship and solidarity, see Thomas Dublin, Women at Work , n. 48, pp. 262-63. Dublin's study of New England millworkers demonstrates that women who left farms to work in the factories also lived largely in female worlds because of the gender segregation of textile factories and boardinghouses.

2. "Informal relationships are not social luxuries, as they are sometimes portrayed, but are quite central in the organization of social life" (Graham Allan, Friendship: Developing a Sociological Perspective , p. 54, in reference to Eugene Litwak, Helping the Elderly [New York: Guilford Press, 1985]).

3. E. Anthony Rotundo, "Romantic Friendship," p. 1. The nineteenth century witnessed an increase in the acceptance of romantic courtship as a basis for marriage in the middle class. The degree to which romantic courtship operated among working and poor people remains a historical question. Stacey J. Oliker, Best Friends and Marriage ; Allan, Friendship , p. 80. In the contemporary world, these social ties vary by class, gender, and race, as they did in the nineteenth century, though often in different ways. Research on friendship points to a class distinction: working-class people (in contrast to middle-class) count kin as friends more than they do non-kin. Extending this principle, workingclass people may more often "treat the home as the exclusive preserve of the family, and not to entertain non-kin in it" (Graham Allan, "Class Variation in Friendship Patterns," p. 391). In contrast, the middle class entertains extensively in the home; they transform it into a space for socializing. Working-class friendship tends to be more situation-specific, emerging particularly at the work place and in the neighborhood. Even the label of "friend" may be questionable: working-class men and women define a friend as someone with whom they mix socially, as opposed to the middle-class definition that infers conscious intention to socialize. In a study of African American families on welfare, Carol B. Stack reports a privileging of kin relationships. The title of a blood relation is bestowed upon very special friends, an honorary acknowledgment that Stack refers to as "fictive kin." This status confers a host of privileges and responsibilities ( All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community ). This tradition of constructing and adopting fictive kin was forged by slaves who were separated from their biological relatives. See also Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 , and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present .

The gender differences are more striking. There has been a popular and scholarly assumption, particularly prior to the second wave of feminism, that men bonded together in solidarity. The women's movement and research such as that of Cott ( Bonds of Womanhood ) and Smith-Rosenberg ( Disorderly Conduct ) have debunked the stereotype of women as competitive, petty, and incapable of friendship. However, reinterpretation of men's relationship with one another is also a result of the second wave of feminism and the lesbian and gay rights movement. See, Joseph H. Pleck, "Man to Man: Is Brotherhood Possible?"; Lillian B. Rubin, Just Friends: The Role of Friendship in our Lives ; and Drury Sherrod, "The Bonds of Men: Problems and Possibilities in Close Male Relationships." Although men and women have about the same number of friends, women are more self-disclosing and seek friends who share similar values and feelings, while men find friends who enjoy similar activities; men want companionship and commitment. Pleck and Rubin claim that men's expectations for emotional intimacy focus on women in contemporary society; men need women for emotional expression. Sherrod finds that men reveal more to their female friends than to their male friends. Paul H. Wright characterizes female friendships as "face-to-face," in contrast to the male "side-by-side" style. However, he notes that "the differences between women's and men's friendships diminish markedly as the strength and duration of the friendships increases'' ("Men's Friendships, Women's Friendships and the Alleged Inferiority of the Latter," p. 19). Allan offers a sociological explanation rooted in his assumptions about gender:

Males generally lead a more 'public' life than females. Their routine work and leisure activities bring them into contact with a relatively wide range of others and require them to develop cordial, though not necessarily very close, relationships with them. In contrast, women tend to occupy a more 'private' realm and have less opportunity or reason to develop extensive social networks. (Allan, Friendship , p. 68)

In the 1990s when a majority of women work in the paid labor force, this explanation sounds like a quaint stereotype. And by now it is clear that I pose Allan's assertions of publicity and privacy as questions rather than assumptions. Karen Walker's work-in-progress challenges these recent assessments of men's versus women's friendships. She finds that men and women answer global questions about friendship with stereotypes about men's and women's friendships. However, when probed about specific behaviors , men's friendships do not look very different from women's. "Men, Women, and Friendship: What They Say; What They Do," Gender & Society , forthcoming.

4. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , p. 168.

5. lbid., pp. 182-83, citing letters from Eliza Chaplin (Nelson) to Laura Lovell, JDPL, 27 July 1820, 24 June 1821. Smith-Rosenberg, "Female World of Love and Ritual," in Disorderly Conduct , p. 57. Smith-Rosenberg's research has sparked a debate about the degree to which women's affection for one another expressed the cultural romanticism dominant in the early nineteenth century, reflected a unique women's culture, or revealed a lesbian sexual practice. How are we to interpret the nineteenth-century sources? Marilyn Ferris Motz, for example, argues that "the language used by these women cannot therefore be taken as a transcription of the usual interaction of female kin living in proximity" ( True Sisterhood: Michigan Women and Their Kin, 1820-1920 , p. 79). In each other's absence, she argues, the letters created an intimacy and way of behaving that had not existed when women were together. Smith-Rosenberg recommends that rather than try to label the behavior normal or deviant, we should consider it a part of a sexual continuum ranging from homosexual to heterosexual. l agree with her rejection of discrete categories and suggest that we explore an alternative vocabulary of friendship that more adequately addresses its nature.

6. Primus Family Letters: Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, 31 May 1861, 23 February 1862 (emphasis in original), March 1862. Addie compared her hunger to her love in several other letters as well.

7. Grace Aguilar, Woman's Friendship: A Story of Domestic Life , p. 41.

8. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 30 August 1859, emphasis in original.

9. Ibid., 16 February 1860, 16 November 1865, 19 November 1860.

10. Ibid., 23 February 1862.

11. Ibid., 5 March 1862; Charity Jackson, New York, to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, March 1862; Addle Brown to Rebecca Primus, March 1862.

12. Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis say that "waiting on tables in northern hotels, restaurants, and saloons represented one of those occupations employing conspicuously large numbers of blacks" ( The Black Worker to 1869 , vol. 1, p. 190). Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 8 November 1865.

13. Lavinia Merrill to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 14 May 1841. Hephzibah to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 15 June 1846. Hephzibah never signed her last name to her letters, so we do not know it. Ibid., 5 March 1848. Erlunia Smith to Ann Lilley, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 31 May 1841. Erlunia appeared less successful in establishing this exchange, perhaps because her anxiety to establish trust also exposed her compelling desire for information for its own sake.

14. Erlunia Smith to Ann Lilley, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 31 May 1841, emphasis in original.

15. Hephzibah to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 5 July 1846. Lavinia Merrill to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 14 May 1841. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 26 December 1852, emphasis in original.

16. Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 30 August 1853 (emphasis in original), 4 May 1851, August 1856 (emphasis in original), 19 July 1855. For another source that complicates the dominant view of harmonious relations between friends and husbands, see Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America .

17. Sarah Trask Diary, 19 June 1849. Primus Family Papers: Addle Brown to Rebecca Primus, 3 November 1861; Henrietta Primus to Rebecca Primus, 15 November 1865.

18. Sarah Trask Diary, 27 April 1849. Holmes Family Papers: Hephzibah to Sarah Carter, 15 June 1846. Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, 9 April 1852 (emphasis in original), August 1856 (emphasis in original).

19. Primus Family Papers: Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, 12 January 1862, 11 September 1862.

20. Holmes Family Papers: Marcella Holmes to Sarah Carter, 25 January 1860, 18 March 1860, 12 April 1860.

21. Ibid., 5 March 1861.

22. Rothman amends this conclusion in the context of her own research on the middle class. She finds that marriage disrupted friendship, but it often later resumed ( Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America , nn. 29, 30, pp. 338-39). Holmes Family Papers: Hephzibah to Sarah Carter, January 1845 (emphasis in original); Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, 12 October 1852.

23. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America ; Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph H. Pleck, The American Man .

24. Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fraternalism ; D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters ; and Pleck and Pleck, The American Man . Parallel to the experience of women, men's distinct social world allowed them to develop their own culture and "encouraged manly intimacy and affection, a love between equals, which was often lacking in sentiments toward the other sex" (Pleck and Pleck, The American Man , p. 13). Scholars point to the men-only spaces which nurtured male culture in the colonial and antebellum periods: lodges, clubs, militia, fire departments, taverns, and voluntary associations. All of these institutions, however, generally encouraged verbal rather than written expressions of affection, producing little documentation of the interpersonal dimension of these relationships.

Mary Ann Clawson sees these all-male spaces in a somewhat different light. In her investigation of fraternal organizations such as the Masons and Odd Fellows in the nineteenth century, she argues that the rise of male organizations, fraternal orders in particular, met a specific need in a turbulent and uncertain nineteenth-century society. Clawson asserts that the fraternal orders functioned as a lifelong defense against threats to manhood. She demonstrates that artisanal manhood was under assault because of industrial capitalism, the rise of female values, and the cultural critique of masculinity. The effect of these sacred bastions of masculinity "was to promote solidarity among men, to reinforce men's separation from women, and thus to validate and facilitate the exercise of masculine power" ("Nineteenth-Century Women's Auxiliaries and Fraternal Orders; p. 41). Mark Carnes similarly argues that "fraternal ritual provided solace and psychological guidance during young men's troubled passage to manhood in Victorian America" ( Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America , p. 14). Also see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture . I assume Clawson would concur that the fraternal organizations did not encourage romantic friendship, though the different nature of the available evidence—organizational records versus personal correspondence—makes conclusions impossible. Also, friendship, even fraternity, was not necessarily the primary reason for joining an organization.

25. John W. Crowley convincingly argues that nineteenth-century middleclass male culture was homosocial and had erotic undercurrents. The culture at large associated male friendships with childishness and powerlessness. However, it did not promote shame or scorn, and certainly did not provoke the virulent homophobia evident in the twentieth century ("Howells, Stoddard, and Male Homosocial Attachment in Victorian America," pp. 301-24). Richard Rabinowitz dissents, arguing that in the 1850s, "men, except for writers and clergymen, seemed relatively immune from this passion for mutuality" ( The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life: The Transformation of the Personal Religious Experience in Nineteenth-Century New England , p. 209).

Jonathan Ned Katz argues that the mere existence of romantic letters between men, so casually kept, "suggests more lenient social attitudes toward male-male intimacy" than we would find today or expect to find in late eighteenth- or nineteenth-century society ( Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. , p. 451). Other historians range in their assessment of the material from a conviction that the language reflects only a spiritual love to a skeptical ambivalence about the innocence of the erotic messages. See Jeffrey Richards, "'Passing the Love of Women': Manly Love and Victorian Society," and D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters . Donald Yacovone flatly rejects the suggestion that romantic language reflects a homoerotic culture, claiming that instead it flows from the age-old tradition of Christian love and brotherhood ("Abolitionists and the 'Language of Fraternal Love'").

There is great difficulty in studying same-sex relationships in a heterosexist and homophobic society because of tendencies to distort unself-conscious relations and read consummated sexual activity into passionate innuendos and because of an inability to put aside twentieth-century biases to sensitively interpret a culture lacking a Freudian obsession with sex. in addition, due to the evidential limitations of historical research, we cannot know "what really happened." For these reasons the notion of a sexual continuum put forth by Smith-Rosenberg and Katz is most useful in capturing historical nuance. It eschews mutually exclusive categories and acknowledges the fluidity of boundaries between sexual and gender identities.

Physical expressions of affection—embracing, sharing a bed—carried no real stigma for men in the nineteenth century and in fact were culturally supported, as confirmed by Martin Duberman's research. He argues that the degree of physical affection men comfortably expressed to other men changed over time, particularly from the early to the late nineteenth century (" 'Writhing Bedfellows' in Antebellum South Carolina: Historical Interpretation and the Politics of Evidence"). Rotundo, "Romantic Friendship," p. 13. The reason male intimacy was limited to the period between boyhood and manhood, Rotundo claims, is that men entered the competitive marketplace which affected their values and attitudes, making them more calculating and instrumental in dealing with other men. While in part this explanation is convincing, if taken to its logical conclusion, it would indicate that anyone involved in economic activity under capitalism was incapable of intimate relations. Granted, men's primary competitors in the nineteenth-century work world were other men, but not necessarily their close friends.

26. The correspondence that has survived contains only letters from J. Foster Beal to Brigham Nims, and none of those Brigham wrote to Foster. The BealNims correspondence was the only collection I found in my search for letters between farmers, artisans, and working-class men who were not relatives. The dearth of documents can be interpreted several ways. One is that scarcity of such letters reflects the rarity of the friendship. Another is that working-class men had friendships, but not ones that survived prolonged absences. Yet another is that the biases inherent in preserving documents of non-elites would render "pedestrian" letters that might have existed not worth preserving, therefore leaving few today, except those between family members.

27. J. Foster Beal to Brigham Nims, Roxbury Town Records, NHSA, 21 March 1832.

28. Ibid., 17 December 1834.

29. Grammatical errors in middle-class letters were sometimes intentional, used as a form of endearment, a kind of baby talk that took a less literate form. However, grammar and spelling were not standardized in the early nineteenth century, as is evident in diaries and letters of the time. Ibid., 17 December 1834. It is interesting to note that a man's tears became fodder for gossip.

30. Ibid., 1 April 1834.

31. Ibid., 21 March 1832; Hephzibah to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, January 1845, emphasis in original; J. Foster Beal to Brigham Nims, Roxbury Town Records, NHSA, 21 March 1832.

32. Arthur Schlesinger, Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books , p. 25; Allan, Friendship . Rothman documents the difficulty of the transition from separate spheres for middle-class men and women to coeducation and overlapping spheres in the early twentieth century ( Hands and Hearts , esp. pp. 190-95).

33. Nathan K. Abbott Diary, 11 January 1856.

34. Sarah Trask Diary, 3 June 1849. In the wake of Luther's death in 1851, Sarah painfully recorded the "names of my friends." She proceeded to list sixteen people—eight men and eight women—as couples. She added her own name and that of Luther Woodberry to the bottom of the list. Ibid., 21 May 1851.

35. Holmes Family Papers: James Holmes to Sarah Carter, 25 August 1855, 29 November 1857. That said, however, when the Civil War began in 1861, James did not enlist in the Union army, although several of his Holmes cousins did. He married in 1862 and settled in Illinois to raise a family. Sarah Holmes Clark also wrote to Sarah Carter about her opinions regarding slaves: "They are the happiest class of people that I ever saw. But you need not tell this to Northern people. I do not expect them to think as I do because they know nothing about it" (17 September 1855). Most of the time Sarah Holmes Clark ignored the fact that Sarah Carter's opinions differed from hers. At one point in 1856, however, she wrote, "Do you know my dear friend that I am very sorry that you are an abolitionist?" In the next sentence she changed the subject. Henry M. Atwood to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 12 March 184[7].

36. John Burleigh to Ann Lilley, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 30 April 1841, emphasis in original. Despite his protestations of innocence, other parts of his letters were sexually suggestive. If he acted the way he wrote, the "old maid" would not have needed jealousy to prompt speculation about romance. This supports the observation that sexual tension was assumed to exist between men and women, except within a safely defined context. Motz finds that in the middle class correspondence between the sexes was only considered proper if the correspondents were related or courting ( True Sisterhood , pp. 58-59).

37. Those families who preserved letters were more likely to be involved family members, concerned about one another's well-being, anchored in a sense of obligation. Annette Arkins argues persuasively that conceptions of separate spheres ignore the fact that men often had homes and families where women also lived ("Brothers, Sisters, and Shared Spheres: An Introduction to a Work in Progress; paper presented at the Pacific Coast Branch Meetings of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, 1988).

38. That said, it is interesting to note that twentieth-century research on friendship reveals an important class distinction in sibling relationships. Allan finds that it was highly unusual for middle-class respondents to have their closest relationship with a sibling. The working-class respondents' relationships that most closely resembled middle-class "best-friendship" were those between siblings, invariably between siblings of the same gender ("Class Variation in Friendship Patterns," p. 392). Chloe Adams to James Adams, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 2 August 1820. Laura Nims to Brigham Nims, Roxbury Town Records, NHSA, 21 May 1834. Laura began a letter to Brigham on 14 September 1834, "Why, Brigham, I want to know if you have gone to Boston." She was not inhibited about displaying her impatience or her anger to her older brother. Brigham Nims to Laura Nims, Roxbury Town Records, NHSA, 18 September 1839.

39. For details of customs in the middle class, see Rothman, Hands and Hearts . The recipe begins: "6 lbs Butter, 6 lbs Flour, 6 lbs Sugar, 4 1/2 lbs Currants, 3 lbs Raisins, 6 lbs or 4 1/2 dozen eggs with the spices. . . ." (Nims Diary, 22 August 1845).

40. Harriet Dame to George Dame, Dame Sister Letters, 26 November 183[5].

41. Stephen Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 23 February 1845 (emphasis in original), 25 January 1846 (emphasis in original).

1. John Plummer Foster Diary, 21 December 1857; Brigham Nims Diary, 10 April 1845. Other diarists who record strings of visitors include Nathan K. Abbott, Thomas Coffin, Susan Brown Forbes, Lizzie Goodenough, Mary Hall, Albert Mason, Ann Stoddard, and Unknown Woman. This level of visiting was not apparent in the diaries of Ivory Hill, Joseph Kimball, and James Weymouth. They did not name their visitors or assign visits the status of events worthy of being recorded in their diaries. Sarah Root Diary, 27 February 1862.

2. Extensive community studies in sociology, anthropology, and history uncover the processes involved in the creation of community. These studies focus on individual and household ties to extended kin and community and situate social networks within the context of urbanization and industrialization. For an overview of community studies and the theoretical issues they raise, see Thomas Bender, Community and Social Change in America , and Maurice R. Stein, The Eclipse of Community: An Interpretation of American Studies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960). For historical studies see Cott, Bonds of Womanhood ; Alan Dawley, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn ; Paul Faler, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts, 1810-1860 ; Michael Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1880 ; Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct ; Stansell, City of Women ; Ulrich, Good Wives ; Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 ; Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930 . For contemporary analyses see Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network: Roles, Norms, and External Relationships in Ordinary Urban Families ; Claude S. Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends: Personal Networks in Town and City ; Gerald D. Suttles, The Social Construction of Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London .

3. "It is through personal connections that society is structured and the individual integrated into society. Although modern nations have elaborate arrays of institutions and organizations, daily life proceeds through personal ties" (Fischer, To Dwell Among Friends , p. 3). Reciprocal visiting identified some relationships as less intimate than friendships. See Mark S. Granovetter, "The Strength of Weak Ties."

4. In her anthropological study of friendships in contemporary Norway, Marianne Gullestad's subjects say visiting necessarily precludes work. "The contradiction between visiting and handiwork is related to the idea they have of what it means to relax. . . . To relax means to do nothing useful; it is the opposite of work." This belief results in the popular contemporary prohibition of work while socializing. In effect, Gullestad's subjects rarely work together except when women care for children and men fix cars or do home repairs ( Kitchen-Table Society: A Case Study of the Family Life and Friendships of Young Working-Class Mothers in Urban Norway , p. 163). Wallace P. Rhodes, comp., Reminiscences of a New Hampshire Town: Belmont Centennial, 1869-1969 , p. 49. Horton and Horton, Black Bostonians . Marilyn Ferris Motz makes the distinction between formal and informal visiting for the middle class. She maintains that people served informal calls on kin while formal calls reinforced the distinction between family and friends in the degree of intimacy and familiarity ( True Sisterhood , pp. 50-51). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich finds this intermingling of communal labor and sociability in eighteenth-century New England ("Housewife and Gadder: Themes of Self-sufficiency and Community in Eighteenth-Century New England"). In her study of a late-nineteenth-century rural community, Osterud similarly finds great conviviality at gatherings for communal labor ( Bonds of Community , esp. ch. 10).

5. Leonard M. Stockwell Memorial Volume, p. 37; Horatio Chandler Diary, March 1841; Eliza Adams to Friends at Home, Adams Family Papers, 25 December 1848.

6. Louisa Chapman Diary, 21-24 and 26 March 1849; Lizzie Goodenough Diary, 9 February 1865.

7. Young, unmarried men were the only ones to mention gathering to socialize outside of someone's home. For example, Francis Bennett frequented Proctor's store in Gloucester and the YMCA in Boston, and Edward Carpenter went to a local barbershop in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to play cards and party. Rhodes states that "perhaps the most important social event of the year was town meeting" ( Reminiscences of a New Hampshire Town , p. 49). It was a male-only event that was as important socially as it was politically (p. 48). For an extensive compilation of New England cultural practices, see B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasury of New England Folklore: Stories, Ballads, and Traditions of the Yankee People .

8. This contrasts with historical studies of other periods and regions. Laurel Ulrich provides a clue for decoding the diaries. For the year 1790, Ulrich maps the social world of Martha Ballard, a New England midwife, and compares it to that of Henry Sewall, the town clerk of Hallowell, Maine. She finds that Martha's diary mentioned approximately three times as many people as Henry's, and it reflected a balance of male and female worlds, while his universe was almost exclusively male ( A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on her Diary, 1785-1812 , pp. 92-93). This apparent difference in social worlds may reflect diary-keeping practices more than actual behavior. If so, it is an important register of a state of mind, a gendered world view.

In Women and Men on the Overland Trail , Faragher characterizes men's labor as social because it extended beyond the family and connected to "the larger social world. Woman's work, always cyclical, always looking inward, did not qualify; it was hidden by domestic draperies" (p. 65). Thus Faragher sees women as isolated, and unlike men, building their social relationships largely within their own families (p. 121).

Marilyn Ferris Motz also finds women deeply involved in social life, a life centered in the extended family. In studying diaries of midwestern women, she notes, in agreement with Faragher, an economic motivation for the difference between married men's and women's attachment to their kin. Because of married men's economic independence, they needed their kin less than women did. When husbands failed to provide support (due to divorce, economic hardship, desertion, death, or incompetence), women had to rely on their kin because few economic opportunities were open to them, and those that existed paid low wages. "The expectation of future need thus led women to exert great effort to maintain ties with their kin" ( True Sisterhood , p. 80). The extended family served as insurance, collateral against financial ruin. Nancy Tomes discovers that elite Quaker women of late-eighteenth-century Philadelphia established a similar system of "social insurance" maintained through visiting. Religion shaped the boundaries of the community, and within those confines women relied heavily upon extended kin ("The Quaker Connection: Visiting Patterns among Women in the Philadelphia Society of Friends, 1750-1850").

In Bonds of Community , Osterud similarly emphasizes the importance of the extended family. In her investigation of upstate New York, she concludes that women prized kin relations more than men because kinship served as the primary basis for forming women's networks. In contrast, men's networks were much broader than women's, including neighbors and coworkers as well as kin. Women gained power from their networks because they were a forum for exchanging resources (labor, services, emotional support) and also because the alliances set limits on a husband's exercise of power.

Other studies that investigate community life observe that the gendered division of "social work" shifts over time. In a study of "The Country Visitor" in rural Wisconsin, Jane Marie Pederson finds that in 1890, men were more likely to be visitors than women. By 1914 this is no longer true; 53% of the visitors are women, and 58% by 1922. That said, however, women were more frequently visitors to family members ("The Country Visitor: Patterns of Hospitality in Rural Wisconsin, 1880-1925," p. 355). This general finding is corroborated in a study of the visiting patterns of Afro-Americans who moved north from Norfolk, Virginia, during the great migration. Earl Lewis finds that the immigrants returned to Norfolk to visit in order "to maintain key relationships, mend strained family ties, and rekindle old friendships without relinquishing the dream of better opportunities.'' In the sample of 840 visits cited in the Norfolk Journal and Guide in 1917, 1921, and 1925, women were twice as likely to be visitors as men ("Afro-American Adaptive Strategies: The Visiting Habits of Kith and Kin among Black Norfolkians during the First Great Migration"). In her anthropological study of friendships in contemporary Norway, Guilestad finds a clear division of labor between men and women. Women "both receive more visitors and go visiting more than men do" Kitchen-Table Society , p. 153).

In her ethnography of African Americans on welfare living m a large U.S. city in the 1970s, Carol Stack explores how families manage to survive on the pittance of government allowance. She finds black women at the heart of domestic networks, those "organized, durable network[s] of kin and non-kin who interact daily, providing domestic needs of children and assuring their survival" ( All Our Kin , p. 31). As key strategic actors, women created and engaged the networks essential to their survival in conditions of extreme poverty. Women swapped clothes, furniture, food, and children in order to redistribute scarce resources within the community. Men contributed to their female kin, but were at the periphery of the female networks.

These percentages are derived from a content analysis of diaries on topics discussed. A diarist need only mention the topic once in order to be counted. The question remains as to how much women and men visited together in mixed groups. In Chapter 3 on friendship, I mapped the debates about men's and women's homosocial versus heterosocial environments. To extend that discussion, Cott finds that while women relied "on female friendship for emotional expression and security," women's relationships (particularly those of elite women) did not exclude men. In fact, Cott claims men and women in the eighteenth century shared an "extensive social life" ( Bonds of Womanhood , p. 173). Martha Ballard's portrait of eighteenth-century Hallowell, Maine, complicates this account. Ulrich finds that Martha's social gatherings mixed gender, age, and marital status without concern. At the same time, husbands and wives rarely made calls together, and young girls commonly accompanied women ( A Midwife's Tale , pp. 144 and 93). While men's and women's production occasionally overlapped, they operated largely independently (p. 80). So Martha describes a peaceful social coexistence between the genders and economic autonomy, even independence.

Reflecting continuity with the eighteenth century, Osterud also uncovers extensive mingling of men and women in nineteenth-century rural society. In contrast to Cott and Smith-Rosenberg, Osterud discovers that women actively attempted to integrate men into their social activities. Women's "social work" bridged husbands and wives as well as households. As a result of the extensive resources they brought to a household, women achieved greater equality in their relationships with men ( Bonds of Community , p. 247).

9. Leonard M. Stockwell Memorial Volume, p. 38. It is possible that men and women recorded visits differently. The observed differences could reflect diary-keeping practices rather than differences in social behavior.

10. Or "social 'insurance,'" as Tomes put it ("The Quaker Connection," p. 181). Ulrich refers to this as "the common fund of neighborliness that sustained families in illness" ( A Midwife's Tale , p. 63). As Guilestad observes in the twentieth century, "Close friendships have constantly to be confirmed by sociability and visiting" ( Kitchen-Table Society , p. 161). For an elaboration of this principle, see Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling .

11. Mary Adams to Adams Family, Adams Family Papers, 1 March 1835; Sarah Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 28 March 1847.

12. Parna Gilbert Diary, 19 September 1852 (emphasis added); Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 10 December 1865.

13. Lizzie Goodenough Diary, 19 February 1865; Sarah Trask Diary, 11 May 1849; Brigham Nims Diary, 27 November 1851.

14. Luna to Ann Lilley Dixon, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, August [12], n.y.; Mary Mudge Diary, 14 June 1854 (emphasis added).

15. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown , p. 93; Sarah Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 4 May 1851. It is interesting that subjects assessed letters in a way similar to visits. Questions consistently arose regarding reciprocity. How soon did the recipient answer? How long was the letter? How many did each person send? What was the news value of the letter? Ibid., 30 October 1854 (written as an addendum to the letter dated 29 October 1854), 19 July 1855. The distinctions she observed between urban and rural visiting did not emerge in this study.

16. Susan Brown Forbes Diary, 28 May 1846; Mary Mudge Diary, 23 November 1854, 17 June 1854; Sarah Trask Diary, 10 April 1849; Hannah, Mary, and Margaret Adams to Mother and Father, Adams Family Papers, 14 November 1841.

17. Sarah Trask Diary, 3 April 1849. The "sons meeting" refers to the Sons of Temperance; Sarah belonged to the Daughters of Temperance. Anne Abbott Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 17 November 1842 (emphasis in original); Elizabeth Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Letters, 22 October 1851.

18. Paulina Bascom Williams Diary, 8 June 1832.

19. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 30June 1850. This sentiment was rarely expressed in other diaries.

20. Mary Giddings Coult Diary, 14 May 1853. Reverend Noah Davis, A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis, a Colored Man , p. 37 (emphasis added); Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 30 October 1854 (written as an addendum to the letter dated 29 October 1854; emphasis in original); Parna Gilbert Diary, 13 September 1851. It is interesting to note that it appears that only women complain of the labors of visiting and attendant fatigue, perhaps because they do more. Men visit somewhat less frequently, although farmers in particular list extra men working with them on the farm almost daily. Men have contact with people through work, some of which they must organize. Because of the greater isolation of domestic labor and piecework, women had to make a greater effort to structure in sociability.

21. Micaela di Leonardo, "The Female World of Cards and Holidays: Women, Families, and the Work of Kinship; p. 442. Other people have applied the basic principle of "emotion work" done by women to a variety of settings. The concept was developed by Arlie Hochschild in The Managed Heart . See also Marjorie L. DeVault, Feeding the Family: The Social Organization of Caring as Gendered Work . Cott found in the early republic that "the characteristic 'work' of unmarried women of the elite largely consisted in maintaining social contacts" ( Bonds of Womanhood , p. 52). Also see Pamela M. Fishman, "Interaction: The Work Women Do," in Women and Work: Problems and Perspectives , ed. Rachel Kahn-Hut, Arlene Kaplan Daniels, and Richard Colyard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 170-80. For development of the theme of Christian conversion, see Chapter 6. As Arlene Kaplan Daniels notes in her analysis of contemporary "sociability work,'' this labor influences people, events, and their commitment to organizations; causes, and giving money ("Good Times and Good Works: The Place of Sociability in the Work of Women Volunteers"). Daniels defines sociability work as "the creation of an ambience by those who provide some kind of hospitality" (p. 363). Thus her focus is a subcategory of what I call "social work."

22. Stephen Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 9 August 1841, emphasis in the original.

23. Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 30 October 1854 (written as an addendum to the letter dated 29 October 1854); Sarah Trask Diary, 22 May 1849, 22 June 1849. Also see: Mary Holbrook Diary, 22 December 1852, 30 December 1852; Marion Hopkins Diary, 27 April 1851.

Sarah came "to stitch" at least weekly. It was not clear whether Marion always stitched with her.

24. Lizzie Goodenough Diary, 10 October 1865. See, for example, Cowan, More Work for Mother ; Glenna Matthews, "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America ; Karen V. Hansen, Taking Back the Day: The Historical Recovery of Women's Household Work Experience , M.A. thesis, University of California at Santa Barbara, 1979; Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1974); Lucy Salmon, Domestic Service ; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework . See, for example, Abigail Baldwin Diary, 1853-1854; Marion Hopkins Diary, 1851-1855; Pollie Tilton Diary, 1 March 1858; and Ezra Sanborn Diary, 1861-1878. Ezra "washt" regularly in addition to dipping candles and making soap. His activities came to a screeching halt soon after his wife gave birth to a baby, but resumed when she became pregnant again.

25. Lizzie Goodenough Diary, 23 March 1865.

26. John Plummer Foster Diary, 25 April 1852. The New Hampshire Historical Society has a name index to the diary of Thomas Coffin, a more prosperous farmer. The length of the index conveys the astonishing number of people involved in the life of Thomas Coffin. Covering the years 1825 to 1835, the index is six and one-half legal-sized pages long, single-spaced, and includes numerous page numbers after each name. The blur of laborers and visitors was true for the female farmers as well. The female heads of farm households included Samantha Barrett and Eliza Adams.

27. Economic historians debate the degree to which farm families supported themselves without aid from other households in the early nineteenth century. Some argue that few families had adequate land, tools, or labor power to be self-sufficient. In other words, a household could not produce its own food and clothing without a system of exchanged goods and services that linked it to the larger community. Ulrich creatively reinterprets evidence for this argument by looking at the work of women at the turn of the nineteenth century. She maintains that the eighteenth century was "a world in which self-sufficiency was sustained by neighborliness, and vice versa" ("Housewife and Gadder," p. 23). As in anthropological studies of economic exchange, Ulrich finds women central to this economic interdependence by trading goods and services, facilitating labor transactions, and engaging in communal work. See also Rayna Reiter, ''Men and Women in the South of France," pp. 252-82; Marilyn Strathern, Women in-Between: Female Roles in a Male World, Mount Hagen, New Guinea ; and Annette B. Weiner, Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976). Antebellum New England working people similarly exchanged services and labor.

28. See, for example, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women ; Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866 . While life expectancy remained relatively constant from 1800 to 1860 for native-born whites and free blacks in the North, epidemics of several diseases—tuberculosis, cholera, and smallpox—hit hard and intermittently made health seem more precarious in the antebellum period. See Peter D. McClelland and Richard J. Zeckhauser, Demographic Dimensions of the New Republic: American Interregional Migration, Vital Statistics, and Manumissions, 1800-1860 , and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts Before 1860."

29. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 10 November 1865. Parna Gilbert Diary, 19 April 1850.

30. Zeloda Barrett wrote in Samantha Barrett's diary, 28 October 1830.

31. This list includes Zeloda Barrett, Parna Gilbert, Pollie Tilton, and other women when they are younger and single, but not quite to the same degree. Pollie Cathcart Tilton Diary, 1858. According to Susan M. Reverby, many antebellum nurses based their claim to the trade on their experience caring for family members. "The Duty or Right to Care? Nursing and Womanhood in Historical Perspective," p. 135. Harriet Severance spent extended periods with relatives caring for the sick and for the household. For example, when she went to Uncle Calvin's in Charlemont, Massachusetts, in September 1863, she worked there until Aunt Elvira died in November. She stayed on, caring for the farm household and her young cousin Lottie. Harriet Severance Diary, 1863-64.

32. Samantha Barrett Diary, October-November, 1830. Names include sisters Zeloda and Margaret, brother Calvin, Mrs. Hudah Spencer, Mrs. Tharn, Emeline, Celestia Butler, Mrs. Holcomb, Fannie Kellog, Mary Teele, Mrs. Gordon Henderson, Sophronia Dowd, Mrs. Mason, Susan Ensign, Mr. Northrop, Mr. Edward Woodruff, and Marilla Tyler. Interestingly, this list includes three men, two of whom are not related to her. Others diaries with shorter lists of watchers include Abigail Baldwin, Pollie Tilton, Harriet Severance, and Sarah Root.

33. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson write, "Caregiving also is an essential activity. The social fabric relies on our ability to sustain life, nurture the weak, and respond to the needs of intimates" ("Circles of Care: An Introductory Essay," p. 4). Susan M. Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850-1945 , p. 1; Mary Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Papers, 12 May, n.y.; Mary Giddings Coult Diary, 30 June 1851; Louisa Chapman Diary, 5 March 1849; Pamela Brown Diary, 10 February 1838, in The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832-1838, Hyde Leslie, 1887, Plymouth Notch, Vermont , ed. Blanche Brown Bryant and Gertrude Elaine Baker, p. 66; Mary Hall Diary, 27 May 1831. It was rare for women to quit work to care for a friend as opposed to kin. Harriet Severance Diary, 8 June 1864.

34. Reverby, "The Duty or Right to Care?" p. 134. Motz similarly emphasizes the role of kinship in executing these duties. She says that strangers (i.e., non-kin) were a distant second preference to caretakers related by blood. Female kin thus acted as the family gatekeepers, protecting the infirm "from the moral and physical pollution of strangers" ( True Sisterhood , p. 106). She does not say where neighbors fit into this matrix but implies that by their non-kin status they were "strangers." Parna Gilbert Diary, 22 May 1851.

35. Mary P. Hall to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 28 April, n.y. She did not return but offered words of advice.

36. Stephen Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Papers, 18 November 1844.

37. Mary Giddings Coult Diary, 6 August 1851, emphasis in original.

38. Mary Metcalf to Emmons Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, n.d., but after 1849; Louisa Chapman Diary, 9, 10, and 14 May 1849; Adelaide Crossman Diary, Crossman Family Diaries, 11 November 1855; Parna Gilbert Diary, 23 September 1849.

39. Sarah Trask Diary, 29 June 1849.

40. Motz, True Sisterhood , p. 98. In a rare exception to the literature, Osterud also finds men caring for sick kin later in the nineteenth century ( Bonds of Community , pp. 247-48).

41. J. Foster Beal to Brigham Nims, Roxbury Town Papers, 17 December 1834; John Plummer Foster Diary, 7, 8, and 12 February 1851, 29 January 1858; Horatio Chandler Diary, 16 February 1842; Ivory Hill Diary, 1, 3, and 5 April 1857. Other men caring for men include Daniel Root caring for Michael Austria (Sarah Root Diary, 3 March 1861); Reverend Baldwin caring for Edson Sprague (Abigail Baldwin Diary, 29 August 1853); Joseph Kimball caring for his son Walter (Joseph Kimball Diary, 7 July 1848); and Ferdinand Crossman caring for his father (Ferdinand Crossman Diary, Crossman Family Diaries, February 1855). Charles A. Benson, a ship steward, regularly cared for men on the ship, administering herbal remedies and comfort (Charles A. Benson Diary, 1862 and 1864). In her autobiography, Mary Orne Tucker recounted the debilitating effects of "watching" on her husband, a Methodist minister. He cared for neighbors and family who were striken with typhus fever, "and the strain upon him proved so great that he well nigh broke down; and for the remainder of his year he was in so poor a state, physically and mentally, that his pulpit was supplied by others" ( Itinerant Preaching in the Early Days of Methodism , p. 101).

42. E.g., Sarah Root Diary, 9 September 1862, and Pollie Tilton Diary.

43. Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, August 1854. Sarah seems a bit defensive about Gilman. She doubted that Sarah Carter and others believed her.

44. Mars, Life of James Mars , p. 53. See also William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Time . The other major exceptions were of course doctors and ministers. Professional license granted doctors access to women's bedsides, but not without resistance (see, for example, Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good ). Ministers were also acceptable watchers, visitors, or nurses; indeed, they were expected to call on the sick, regardless of gender. Motz observes that women preferred female caretakers because bedside interaction provided an opportunity for intimacy and a "sense of security" ( True Sisterhood , p. 106). These exceptions indicate that acceptability as a caretaker involved a combination of status in society (minister, doctor, woman, or black man) and relation to the patient.

45. Edward J. Carpenter Diary, 10 August 1844. The examples of men fetching women caretakers are too numerous to mention.

46. Ehrenreich and English, For Her Own Good ; Judith Walzer Leavitt Brought to Bed: Childbearing in America, 1750-1950 ; Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz, Lying-In: A History of Childbirth in America . Doctors were called in extraordinary circumstances, but midwives managed routine births.

47. Leavitt, Brought to Bed , p. 93.

48. Leavitt says that all women, except the very poorest, relied on female, home-based networks: "Women held in common the desire for and achievement of this female cushion of security despite class or opportunity differences" ( Brought to Bed , p. 83). The fact that births were rarely discussed by women is partly an artifact of the sample. Of those women who had time to keep diaries, most were young, unmarried, or at least without children.

49. Mary Coult Jones Diary, 2 March 1856.

50. Horatio Chandler Diary, 8 August 1840. Quoted in Leavitt, Brought to Bed , p. 94.

51. Mary Hall Diary, 14 May 1829; Francis Bennett, Jr., Diary, 15 July 1854; John Plummer Foster Diary, 30 August 1857; Horatio Chandler Diary, 7 August 1840.

52. Samuel Shepard James Diary, 1 June 1848, 19 March 1868; Joseph Kimball Diary, 29 September 1838, 2 February 1833.

53. The diaries of Joseph Kimball and David Smith display no enthusiasm for babies of either sex. Stephen Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 9 October 1845 (emphasis in original), 2 November 1852 (emphasis in original); John Plummer Foster Diary, 30 November 1858 (emphasis in original), 25 December 1852. See Viviana Zeliger, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children . Zeliger points out that people in the twentieth century prefer to adopt an infant girl, emotionally priceless and not expected to contribute to household production.

54. For example, Albert Mason Diary, 22 October 1845; Vestus Haley Parks Diary, Parks Family Papers, 5 December 1827; Osterud, Bonds of Community , p. 231. Elizabeth Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Papers, 22 October 1851. For example of casual references to quilting, see Abigail Baldwin Diary, 6 January 1854 and 21 July 1854; Pollie Tilton Diary, 10 September 1856.

55. Brigham Nims Diary, 29 and 30 April 1845; Vestus Haley Parks Diary, Parks Family Papers, 11 and 13 January 1829. "Freman Powers; undoubtedly an African American, entered into the life of Vestus Haley Parks in the way many white-black encounters took place—via entertainment. Mary Holbrook Diary, 26 January 1853. Susan Brown, a textile worker and schoolteacher during the 1840s, attended a quilting party at Daniel Locke's house. Susan Brown Forbes Diary, 1 May 1845; Mary Holbrook Diary, 9 February 1854; Arthur Bennett Diary, 22 March 1844. Other examples include parties. Ann Stoddard wrote, "Riley here and a number of others in evening. The boys made some molasses candy. It was very good indeed" (Diary, 2 January 1866). She later went with Riley to an apple-paring.

56. Zeloda Barrett Diary, 28 January 1820; Mary Mudge Diary, 11 May 1854; Adelaide Crossman Diary, Crossman Family Diaries, 7 April 1856. For other examples, see Samantha Barrett Diary, e.g., 10 June 1828; Pamela Brown Diary, 26 March 1838; Susan Brown Forbes Diary, 28 November 1845; and Unknown Author, Diary of Newburyport farmer's wife, 16 March 1859. See also Abigail Baldwin and Harriet Severance diaries for informal quilting. Mary Holbrook Diary, 6 September 1854 through 21 September 1854.

57. See, for example, Nathan K. Abbott Diary, 12 June 1855, and John Plummer Foster Diary, 28 June 1852; Abigail Baldwin Diary, 1 November 1853.

58. Edward J. Carpenter Diary, 16 May 1844.

59. Edward P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism"; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , pp. 61, 62.

60. The percentages total more than 100 because one individual could have multiple employments over the course of her or his life. See Table 1.

61. Dublin details the dual processes of speedup and stretch-out. The textile factories assigned double the number of looms to each weaver, dramatically increasing productivity. They compensated with a slight increase in wages, which made some workers happy, others angry, and the corporation much more profitable ( Women at Work , pp. 109-11).

62. Erlunia Smith to Ann Dixon, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 27 January n.y.; Anne Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 4 April 1844. See, for example, Pollie Tilton Diary, 1839-1860. l think this would be true for mothers as well, but because of their workload, fewer mothers kept diaries.

63. See, for example, Hal S. Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind: Rural Society in Nineteenth-Century New England , and Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City . Nothing could compare to the traumatic dislocation resulting from life as an underground fugitive, fearful of detection, capture, and return to slavery. See, for example, Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , and Moses Roper, A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery . However, even free blacks in the North felt endangered after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. Charles Metcalf to parents, Metcalf-Adams Family Papers, 5 April 1843 (emphasis in original); Charles A. Benson Diary, 13 May 1862. In describing fraternity among sailors at sea, Margaret S. Creighton writes of the raucous life and hazing rituals of white sailors that created solidarity in the forecastle. Her description suggests the reasons Charles may have found sailors a "pack" of "ignorant" men ("Fraternity in the American Forecastle, 1830-1870"). Creighton's article also elaborates the reasons that common sailors found solace and camaraderie with one another. Charles A. Benson Diary, 21 May 1862. Of seamen and mariners, Foner and Lewis say that "blacks represented a very important percentage of the workers in that dangerous, exploited, and underpaid occupation'' ( The Black Worker , p. 190). The most common occupations for African Americans in Massachusetts in 1860 were, in descending order: laborers, mariners, barbers, farm laborers, and servants. Only eight people were identified as stewards, one of whom was presumably Charles Benson (Foner and Lewis, The Black Worker , p. 133). This information is derived from the 1860 Massachusetts Census, which appears to exclude women, or greatly undercount them. Charles A. Benson Diary, 21 May 1862.

64. For an excellent discussion of the tensions between employers and domestics, see Stansell, City of Women , ch. 8. Intriguingly, confusion regarding social status emerged for those domestic workers who were maids for wealthy urban families. Lorenza Berbineau, a domestic who worked for Francis Cabot Lowell II of Boston, regularly recorded visitors to the household. Nowhere in her diary did she specify whether the visitors called on the Lowells or on her. Lorenza worked for the family for thirty-nine years, and in the absence of an independent social life, intensely identified with her employers. Despite the fact that the demarcation between the class of her employers, their friends, and herself was blurred in no way, from simply reading the diary it is virtually impossible to discern whether the visitors' she records in her diary were guests of the Lowells or visitors of hers. Lorenza Berbineau Diary, Francis Cabot Lowell II Papers, 1851-1869.

An anonymous author wrote "The Story of Betsey," a memorial for a woman who was a domestic worker for a proper Boston family. She too attested to the overlapping social life: "All the friends of our family were her friends, and it was pleasant to see them meet her With a welcome which her modest yet beaming smile responded to." This did not reflect social equality for Betsey; it was Betsey's job to be pleasant ( The Story of Betsey ). See David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America . And the patronizing tone of the memorial communicates the message that she assigned the label of "friends" to acquaintances who exchanged pleasantries and who understood their respective places in the hierarchy of relations between employer and domestic servant. While the author observed Betsey's "modest yet beaming smile," we do not know how Betsey felt when she was smiling. For a contemporary account of domestic servants' relationships with their employers, see Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985).

Lizzie Goodenough, a "hired girl" as opposed to an urban domestic servant, similarly recorded visitors. However, the visitors to the households probably did represent greater equality of circumstance and more of a blending of social life than was true for Betsey or Lorenza Berbineau. Yet Lizzie clearly noted when visitors came just to see her. Addle Brown was another domestic worker who did not experience status confusion. In great detail she documented her relationship with her African American employers in New York City. While she called her employers "Mother" and "Father," she did not reciprocate Mother's espoused affection for her. Addie never lost sight of her need for the paycheck. She shared a social standing as African American with Mother and Father, despite their class differences. But the class distinctions stood as a barrier in their relationship. She socialized with the other hired help, the boarders, Mother, and Mother's guests, but she did not misinterpret the situation. Lizzie Goodenough Diary, 19 March 1865. Ann Stoddard Diary, 1866, is another example of this. In the transition from schoolteacher to domestic servant, her social world contracted dramatically.

65. Motz, True Sisterhood , p. 5.

1. Eliza Adams to The Family, Adams Family Papers, 19 September 1857. For comprehensive discussion of nineteenth-century birth-control methods, see D'Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters , and Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America .

2. This phrase was used by Marcella Holmes when she asked Sarah Carter her opinion of Marcella's sister's new husband, whom Marcella had not yet met. Marcella Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 5 March 1861; Robert Paine, "What is Gossip About? An Alternative Hypothesis," p. 279.

3. Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip , p. 34; Addle Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 16 December 1861.

4. Laurel Ulrich referred to neighbors as "an informal jury of one's peers" in colonial New England ( Good Wives , p. 61).

5. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 11 September 1862; Harriot Curtis, "Aunt Letty; or, The Useful," cited in JoAnne Preston, "Millgirl Narratives," p. 24.

6. Spacks, Gossip , p. 31. The community jury occasionally did convene to adjudicate disputes. For example, James Mars, a black man born into slavery, claimed that his owner, Mr. Munger of Connecticut, promised him a cow when he was freed. When Mr. Munger retracted his promise, James Mars went on strike. They turned their dispute over to a community forum to help them resolve it:

I finally said 1 would leave it to three men if they were men that I liked: if they were not, I would not. He said I might name the men; their judgment was to be final. The men were selected, the time and place specified. The day came, the parties met, and the men were on hand. Mr. Munger had his nephew for counsel; I plead my case myself. A number of the neighbors were present." (James Mars, Life of James Mars , p. 52)

The "arbitrators," as James labeled them, decided that James owed Mr. Munger $90—a decision against James Mars, but one by which he abided.

In another example, Parna Gilbert discussed the role of her church as an arbiter in a community dispute. She recorded that the "Bretheren and Sisters of our church which have long been at variance with each other but whose difficulties were presented before the church on Thursday and Saturday last in the presence of Mr. [Birby] of C.W. & Mr. B. & Clark of [?] for an investigation of the matter, and their attendance in trying to assist in settleing the difficulty if all warm in exercise of that love" (Diary, 23 December 1849).

Robert N. Bellah, "The Meaning of Reputation in American Society;' p. 743. Anselm Strauss, in Negotiations: Varieties, Contexts, Processes, and Social Order , observes that negotiations "pertain to the ordering and articulation of an enormous variety of activities" (p. ix).

7. Peter J. Wilson, "Filcher of Good Names: An Enquiry into Anthropology and Gossip," p. 100; Laurel Ulrich, Good Wives , p. 96. D'Emilio and Freedman characterize this shift from communal control over behavior to individual control as the psychological shift from shame to guilt ( Intimate Matters ).

Contemporary psychologists now challenge the portrait of late-twentieth-century culture as free of shame. For a comprehensive review of this literature, see Robert Karen, "Shame." Eliza Adams to Margaret, Adams Family Papers, 21 October 1837.

8. Paulina Bascorn Williams Diary, 3 September 1830 (emphasis in original); Leonard Stockwell Memorial Volume, p. 33.

9. Litwack, North of Slavery , p. 3. The various New England states abolished slavery at different times, some gradually with grandfather clauses, and others immediately. Brown, The Life of William J. Brown , p. 86.

10. Susan Dwyer Amussen's study of early modern England points to a similar phenomenon: "Sexual behavior was not the only component of reputation. Relationships within families were observed and evaluated" ( An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England , p. 100). Spacks, Gossip , p. 32.

11. Erlunia Smith to Ann Lilley, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 23 May 1841.

12. William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, Brought Down to the Present Times , pp. 111-12. We do not know the race of his detractors or the role of racism in the accusation. A young white girl washing laundry for a black family would probably have provoked talk about her chastity regardless of her sexual conduct, both because of interracial contact and because it was unusual for a white woman to work for a black family.

13. Abigail Baldwin Diary, 8 September 1853; Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 1 January 1866.

14. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 16 December 1861; Abigail Baldwin Diary, 4 August 1853. Stephen and Anne Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 23 February 1845.

15. Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 10 December 1865.

16. Wilson, "Filcher of Good Names; p. 101; Stephen Parker to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 11 April 1848 (emphasis in original); Mary Adams to Adams Family, Adams Family Papers, 1 March 1835.

17. Bellah, "The Meaning of Reputation in American Society; p. 743; Mary Mudge Diary, 29 September 1854; Parna Gilbert Diary, 2 March 1851.

18. Leonard M. Stockwell Memorial, p. 20.

19. Sarah Trask Diary, 7 May 1849, 10 August 1849.

20. Sarah Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 5 November 184[7], 12 December 1851 (emphasis in original). Sarah wrote this letter shortly before she married. Ibid., 2[3] April 1853, 19 July 1855, 30 August 1853.

21. Gossip about deviant behavior reminds group members of their commonalities and heightens their distance from the subject. Max Gluckman characterizes gossip as the "hallmark of membership" ("Gossip and Scandal; p. 313). Arthur Bennett Diary, 20 May 1844, emphasis in the original.

22. John E Szwed, "Gossip, Drinking, and Social Control: Consensus and Communication in a Newfoundland Parish," p. 435. Erlunia Smith to Ann Lilley Dixon, Ann Lilley Dixon Correspondence, 4 February n.y.

23. Eliza Adams to Adams Family, Adams Family Papers, 5 February 1848.

24. Melissa Doloff Diary, 10 September 1858.

25. Mary Mudge Diary, 7, 8, 9 March 1854. Mary refers to Philip Bryant, her future husband; as "B." in her diary. Ibid., 20 June 1854.

26. For a discussion of these issues, see Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks."

27. All quotations relating to the Bodwell v. Osgood case come from Box 61, no. 90 files of the Court of Common Pleas, 1824, at the Essex County Courthouse, unless otherwise noted. Judge Samuel Putnam, who heard the case in the Supreme Judicial Court, kept notes summarizing the case that included some verbatim testimony. Osgood's letter to the committee of school district no. 8 in Methuen, May 3, 1824, was entered as evidence.

28. This point is not elaborated in the case records. It possibly relates to the circumstances of Osgood's daughter, who was at one time a teacher in the same school as Bodwell. She had not been reappointed to the 1824 summer session when Bodwell had been hired to teach. Mrs. Caleb Swan had no legal standing as a married woman in 1824, which is why Bodwell sued Mr. Swan for Mrs. Swan's behavior. Octavius Pickering, "Sophia W. Bodwell versus Caleb Swan et ux ."

29. Although the court records list two female witnesses to be remunerated for testifying, neither was mentioned in the judge's case notes. The midwife, Mrs. Jones, whom Osgood represented as being present at the birth of Bodwell's illegitimate child, was not called as a witness. The marginalization of women in civil legal disputes contrasts sharply with the colonial period, when women acted as primary witnesses, their wisdom called upon as an essential civic service.

30. Wage data is not available for the school district in Methuen in 1824. However, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth Abstract of Returns from the School Committees of Several Towns reports that in 1833-34, Methuen paid its summer—school teachers $9 per month (less than half of wages for winter-session school—summer-school teachers were almost exclusively women, and winter teachers were mostly men at this time). JoAnne Preston, "Women's Aspirations and the Feminization of School Teaching in NineteenthCentury New England," lecture given at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, April 1992. Because wages generally rose over the course of the century, I assume that teachers made less in 1824 than they did ten years later. While Sophia Bodwell's settlement was large, it was considerably less than the $5,000 for which she had sued. The judge advised the jury on how to assess those damages:

Upon the subject of damages (if the jury should find it necessary to consider that question) I remarked that the Pl[aintif]fs was not to come into court to acquire a character—but to vindicate her character which had been already acquired, from unjust aspersions—That if the Def[endan]t had proved that her Character was of little or no value—they would give little Damages.

Pickering, "Sophia W. Bodwell versus Benjamin Osgood."

31. Sarah Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 13 October 1851.

32. Grimes, Life of William Grimes , pp. 119, 118. Grimes does not say specifically what those accusations were.

33. That said, the bravest of the female diarists to counter community opinion, Mary Mudge, Sarah Holmes, and Melissa Doloff, were all schoolteachers. Robert C. Post, "The Social Foundations of Defamation Law: Reputation and the Constitution." Within such ceremonies, remuneration had less meaning than the decision regarding character because the dispute was about honor and dignity, which have no clear monetary value.

34. Steven Lukes, ed., Power , p. 5. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism , p. 225. Robert Paine, "What is Gossip About?" p. 283.

35. Spacks, Gossip , p. 6-7; Ulrich, Good Wives , pp. 220, 57; Mary Beth Norton, "Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland; p. 22.

36. Susan Harding, "Women and Words in a Spanish Village," p. 303. Because they are subordinate in society, "women must defend and advance themselves with whatever everyday verbal skills, such as squabbling, finesse, and gossip, they may develop" (p. 295). Although forbidden to do so in the village she studies, women gossip. Like Gluckman, Harding sees the importance of gossip in maintaining village cohesion; talk effectively integrates village households. But unlike Gluckman, Harding assigns a unique role to women. Spanish men, who supposedly only talk and never gossip, create hierarchy, distance, and separation between households: "Their inclination is toward isolation and self-sufficiency. If it is the role of men to build and keep up the figurative fences, it is the role of women to climb them from time to time" (p. 301). Despite the taboo, women spread their news, good and bad, bringing village inhabitants closer to one another via information.

37. For a review of some of the stereotypes, see Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (New York: Elsevier, 1976), ch. 6. In his study of a contemporary synagogue, Samuel C. Heilman finds gossip utilized by both men and women. In addition to gossip's role in the social construction of community reality, he characterizes it as a type of wealth whose value is determined by supply and demand for information. The more scarce the information, the more valuable it is, and the more it enhances its owner's status. However, there are limits to the wealth; if people overzealously indulge, they become gossipmongers, gossip gluttons. In the synagogue Heilman studies, secretive gossip—gossip that is shared only among a few—is used by the male leadership to maintain their prestige and power: "They use it to hold on to their power and to peddle influence, often at the expense of their rivals' reputations" ( Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction , pp. 164 and 179).

38. That said, however, there are examples from the nineteenth century of reputations tainted and careers endangered because of adultery (e.g., Henry Ward Beecher), as well as examples of reputations and careers unaffected (e.g., Mabel Loomis Todd and Austin Dickinson). Amussen says the bases shifted differently over time for men and women. Women's reputations become based on increasingly narrow criteria, while men's reputations were more broadly based, including social and economic criteria ( An Ordered Society , p. 103). One important difference between my research and Amussen's, other than time and place, is that I rely largely on what working people discuss in ordinary, everyday circumstances. She investigates situations that have passed a threshold, prompting the target of gossip to take public, i.e., legal, action against the perpetrator. Thus, court records reveal what is most insulting to an individual, and they do not necessarily reflect the range of criteria for a good character.

39. Numerous examples exist in the North as well as the South. For examples in the North, see Brown, The Life of William J. Brown ; Mars, Life of James Mars ; James L. Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith ; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl .

40. Wilson, "Filcher of Good Names," p. 99.

1. Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 , p. 98. Marcella Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 25 May 1860 (emphasis added). Marcella's brother was not so easily persuaded. He voiced his criticisms of Christian practice to Sarah (James Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 21 November 1858), and did not similarly experience pressure from the group: I should think better of Christian denominations if they were willing to accord the sincerity they claim for themselves to those who dissent to their views yet act quite as consistently. . . . I have given it much thought and have examined the subject pretty thoroughly and I think impartially and cannot come to the conclusion that you probably have. And I am sorry to say that I have too often heard facts apparently wilfully perverted from the pulpit.

2. Some think it private, others public. Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza conceives of it as a "middle-ground" in a continuum between public and private ( In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins ). Clarke E. Cochran argues it is both private and public ( Religion in Public and Private Life ). My discussion pertains almost exclusively to Protestant religions in New England.

3. Most scholars agree that the antebellum increase in religious enthusiasm stemmed from the rise of capitalism and the emergence of the middle class. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium ; Donald G. Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis"; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class ; and Smith-Rosenberg, "The Cross and the Pedestal: Women, Anti-Ritualism, and the Emergence of the American Bourgeoisie." According to Charles Sellers, Christianity provided a kulturkampf, the battleground between land and market cultures, the cultural medium through which people managed and understood the intensification of capitalism in the nineteenth century ( The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 , p. 31). Religion was also a weapon brandished in both class and gender battles. Middle-class employers used religion to discipline their workers, while the urban poor used their faith as an instrument in their struggles with the middle class. At the same time, women employed morality against the godless proclivities of men. Sociologists have long studied the multiple dimensions of religious life. Beginning with Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , this tradition continues today with books such as Gerhard Lenski, The Religious Factor: A Sociological Study of Religion's Impact on Politics, Economics, and Family Life (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977). See also Nancy F. Cott, "Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England."

4. C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, "The Religious Dimension: Toward a Sociology of Black Churches; p. 8. See also, Litwack, North of Slavery , p. 188. "The Negro church was far more than simply a religious institution. The church was 'school, his forum, his political arena, his social club, his art gallery, his conservatory of music. It was lyceum and gymnasium as well as sanctum sanctorum '" (George A. Levesque, Black Boston: Negro Life in Garrison's Boston, 1800-1860 , pp. 266-67, quoting from The Liberator , 9 January 1852). As with white parishioners, most African Americans "appeared to maintain religious affiliations, at least for social, if not for spiritual, reasons" (Litwack, North of Slavery , p. 191 ). Obviously, religious beliefs played a major role in the black community as well.

5. William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 . Paula Aymer argues that the awakenings also offered opportunities to the African-American community ( The Second Great Awakening: An Opportunity for Blacks in America , M.A. thesis, Northeastern University, 1983). Although revivals occurred before and after, the Second Great Awakening was a period of numerous revivals and conversions. Revivals built upon pre-existing religious and organizational frameworks and a predisposition to religious beliefs.

6. Methodism became the largest denomination in 1844, when it reached a membership of one million. Ironically, 1844 was also the year that the Methodist church split—North versus South—over the issue of slavery. This split lasted almost one hundred years (Edwin Scott Gaustad, A Religious History of America , p. 188). American religion underwent a revolution in the antebellum period. The number of denominations proliferated and competing interpretations of the Bible multiplied. "This was a religious environment that brought into question traditional authorities and exalted the right of the people to think for themselves. The result, quite simply, was a bewildering world of clashing opinion" (Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity , p. 81). In this milieu, religion promised stability but was largely unable to deliver. The spiraling number of world views could confuse as easily as it could enlighten. However, religion could offer a vision of the future, a path through the sea of change, some concepts and vocabulary with which to frame and understand the reorganization of antebellum economic and social life.

The dissenting religions offered immediate salvation through conversion, rather than predestination or a requirement for extended study of the scripture. The radical belief systems "empowered ordinary people by taking their deepest spiritual impulses at face value rather than subjecting them to the scrutiny of orthodox doctrine and the frowns of respectable clergymen" (Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity , p. 10). They did not require or encourage their clergy to be formally educated in theology, and for this reason opened the doors to uneducated whites and African Americans who would otherwise have been denied their calling. Unlike the Congregationalists, the dissenting religions spurned education and condemned attention to the arts and literature. This revolt against the dominant culture stemmed from several factors: (1) their rejection of elite religion as it had been practiced; (2) the impulse to democratize; and (3) the worry that "theology, philosophy, art, and science might lure the faithful from salvation" (T. Scott Miyakawa, Protestants and Pioneers: Individualism and Conformity on the American Frontier [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964], p. 161). Evangelists adamantly condemned worldly amusements, including dancing, reading novels, going to the theater, and drinking. Reading fiction for entertainment became a target of virulent attacks from the pulpit.

A dispute exists about whether a national culture has ever existed in the United States. See, for example, Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public .

7. In almost all cases, the shift in language was short-lived. Subjects returned to their previous ways of speaking and dropped their obsession with the religious condition of their friends. Only two diarists referred to their conversion to Christianity in their diaries. The other conversion accounts come from correspondents and autobiographers.

8. George S. Whipple Diary, 15 May 1838; George Henry, Life of George Henry, Together with a Brief History of the Colored People in America , p. 41; Sarah Trask Diary, 27 May 1849. Church did not live up to its spiritual promise for her. Then when she arrived at home, she found her mother in bed with the headache. In the same entry, she wrote, "I guess for the future I will stay at home, for there is no peace for me, all ways something to worry me."

9. Eliza Adams to Margaret Adams, Adams Family Papers, 21 October 1837; Charles A. Metcalf to Mrs. Joseph A. Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Papers, 2 June 1844.

10. Hannah Adams to Edmund Adams, Adams Family Papers, 13 February 1854; Margaret Adams to Hannah Adams, 11 June n.y.; Abigail Baldwin Diary, 15 September 1853. In part, Abigail's and Mary's husbands' jobs depended on their ability to draw people into the church's folds, which in turn translated into money (alms/subscriptions). Paulina Bascom Williams Diary, 6 June 1830. Paulina was a Congregationalist but other Christian denominations shared her critique of freemasonry. "Many antebellum denominations from Presbyterians to Freewill Baptists condemned Freemasonry as heretical, in part because its universalist sentiments denied the uniqueness of Christian revelation and in part because it reeked of magic" (Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People , p. 235). Paulina, Bascom Williams stayed home from services because she did not have proper shoes. Also, she was pregnant and did not have clothes that fit (Paulina Bascom Williams Diary, 14 October 1831). Addle Brown at various times lacked winter shoes or a winter hat, and one time she felt the flowers on her hat were too bright so she did not go to services (Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, 14 November 1861). Sarah Beacham Diary, 27 December 1863.

11. Mary Hall Diary, 21 June 1829. I excluded diaries from the study that focused solely on religious revelations.

12. Horatio Chandler Diary, 28 March 1841.

13. Barbara Loomis, Piety and Play: Young Women's Leisure in an Era of Evangelical Religion, 1790-1840 ; Barron, Those Who Stayed Behind , p. 44. For a British example of this phenomenon, see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Tucker, Itinerant Preaching , pp. 109-10.

14. Mary Holbrook Diary, 12 February 1853. In her diary, Sarah Root records black men preaching at a church in Belchertown, Massachusetts, in 1859 and 1860. Peter Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit: The Autobiography of Rev. Peter Randolph; The Southern Question Illustrated and Sketches of Slave Life , p. 45. In the face of the widespread adoption of Christianity by African Americans, many whites in the North continued to exhibit ambivalence or even hostility. William J. Brown wrote in his autobiography about white treatment of black people in Providence, Rhode Island: "lt was a common thing for colored people to be disturbed on the street, especially on the Sabbath" ( The Life of William J. Brown , p. 126).

At the time of the American Revolution, African Americans in the North worshiped in predominantly white congregations. However, soon thereafter, northerners' prejudice against integrated services grew. Neither Christian faith nor anti-slavery sentiments overrode bigotry for most white northerners. Some churches segregated free blacks into separate pews, others exiled black worshipers to a balcony. In his autobiography, the Reverend Jeremiah Asher described segregated pews at the First Baptist Church in Hartford, Connecticut:

There were situated at that time, in the gallery of the meeting house, two large pews, capable of holding some twenty persons. The pews, situated at the corner of the galleries, were separated from the other seats by partitions, about three feet high, between the minister and his colored hearers, which concealed them mainly from the view of the congregation and minister." ( An Autobiography , pp. 35-36)

This segregation eventually prompted Jeremiah to move to the Union Church on Talcott Street in Hartford, Connecticut, established by the African American community.

Even Quakers, early and consistent abolitionists, admonished blacks not to sit in pews with white abolitionist Quakers. Sarah Mapps Douglass wrote about the treatment of her mother at a Quaker meeting, where a Friend told her "that the colored people sat up stairs 'as F[rien]ds do not like to sit by thy color'" (Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century , p. 131). It was this kind of hypocrisy that inspired the "come-outer" movement among abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s. The radical wing of the anti-slavery movement encouraged principled Christians to leave their church if it did not declare itself staunchly against slavery and race prejudice.

Free blacks in the North established independent churches as "asylum from white prejudice" (Levesque, Black Boston , p. 266). The black leaders Absalom Jones and Richard Allen of Philadelphia organized two of the first independent churches for blacks in the North. Others, including the Methodists and Baptists, followed suit, particularly between 1790 and 1810 (Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity , pp. 107-8). The first black churches in New England included First African Baptist Church of Boston in 1805, the nonsectarian African Union Meeting House in Providence in 1820, and the Colored Union Church in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1824 (Edward D. Smith, Climbing Jacob 's Ladder: The Rise of Black Churches in Eastern American Cities, 1740-1877 , pp. 44-57). These churches provided a safe environment for African Americans to observe their cultural traditions and develop their own interpretation of the gospel. Randolph, From Slave Cabin to Pulpit , pp. 48, 54. Mary Orne Tucker brings up another example of a black man ministering in a white congregation. Her ''evaluation" of Reverend Marrs is quite telling. On October 20, 1842, she notes that "Mr. Tucker is aided in the work by a colored man named who is in many respects quite a remarkable person. He is gifted with a strong native genius, a good acquaintance of human nature, a readiness of delivery, and a happy faculty of illustrating his discourses with curious comparisons and quaint figures of speech. A good education would make him quite a prodigy; but he is unlearned, and sometimes too boisterous for good effect. He draws large audiences, and is attracting very general attention" (Tucker, Itinerant Preaching , p. 103). He was an oddity, someone "too boisterous for good effect" in a white church. Nonetheless, many white people came to see him, and he undoubtedly had a large following in the African-American community. Examples pop up in diaries as well. Joseph Kimball wrote, "Sunday at meeting white Negro pr." (31 August 1845), "Mr. Lang, a collerd man lectored in the baptist" (19 April 1846), and "black man pr. in the evening" (20 January 1850). Other black ministers also document the curiosity-seekers who come to see them preach (Lincoln and Mamiya, "The Religious Dimension," p. 6).

15. Daniel Calhoun, The Intelligence of a People ; Susan Brown Forbes Diary, 12 March 1843; Marcella Holmes to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 25 May 1860; Hannah Adams to Mary Adams, Adams Family Papers, 30 December 1858; Sarah Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 25 December 1842; Charles A. Metcalf to Mrs. Joseph A. Metcalf, 2 June 1844. The theme of sleep in church rose repeatedly as a problem. Mary Orne Tucker told a story of an occurrence in her Universalist church in Charlestown, New Hampshire: "The bold preacher suddenly delivered with considerable emphasis that passage, 'Awake, thou that sleepest.' This aroused a sleepy old Frenchman, who, overcome by the fatigues of the week and the warmth of the day, sat nodding in his pew. He supposing the remark directed particularly at himself, jumped up in great anger, exclaiming, 'What you mean, sar? Can't I take von leetel nap in mine own pew without yon insult, sar? I leaves dis house, sar, an' I comes here no more, sar!' and out marched the irate Frenchman, shaking his cane violently and stamping upon the floor. Such scenes were not uncommon" ( Itinerant Preaching , pp. 26-27). Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 19 August 1849; Alfred Porter Diary, 16 April 1854.

16. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity , p. 135; "Methodist itinerant preaching deliberately used theatricality to promote conversion," Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith , p. 238. There are many parallels between the theater and the church, which I do not have the space to develop. Suffice it to say that the techniques of a minister, not unlike those of an actor, strove through gesture, voice, staging, and evocative imagery to spellbind the audience and move them to a transcendent understanding of greater truths. For a discussion of these issues in the theater, see Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double , translated by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958). Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity , p. 134.

17. James Adams, Jr., to Joseph Addison Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 14 May 1838; Sarah Holmes Clark to Sarah Carter, Holmes Family Papers, 18 January 1853.

18. Charles Metcalf to Parents, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 27 April 1844; Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 31 December 1849, 30 June 1850.

19. Rabinowitz, The Spiritual Self in Everyday Life , p. xxvi. Church affiliation varied by race, class, and geographical location. African Americans were disproportionately drawn to the Methodist and Baptist faiths, the first denominations to establish independent black churches, as were the poor and working classes (Smith, Climbing Jacob's Ladder ). In contrast, professionals and those of the upper classes disproportionately attended the Congregational, Episcopal, and Unitarian churches. White farmers were less likely to be church members than merchants or master craftsmen (Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform, and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 , p. 95). These affiliations were not absolute. The culture of the countryside—cooperative, parochial, fatalistic, somewhat mystical, and superstitious—found the earthy emotionalism of the evangelical Baptist and Methodist churches appealing. But this, too, varied by region; in some areas, being a farmer meant being a Congregationalist. In contrast, the urban environment—which cultivated a belief in the role of the individual in one's own salvation and the moral culpability of the individual—found the rationality of Unitarianism and Universalism more compatible with people's conceptions of themselves and the competitive, cosmopolitan, and activist aspects of the new market. As Sydney E. Ahlstrom writes, urban life "tended both to stimulate evangelism and to expose the existence of a common tradition" ( A Religious History of the American People , p. 470). According to Litwack, this was also true in the black community ( North of Slavery , pp. 195-96).

20. Asher, An Autobiography , pp. 24-25.

21. Reverend Samuel Harrison, His Life Story , pp. 13-14. The Reverend Noah Davis tells of a similar distinction made in the South by free blacks. When he first went to Baltimore to establish a church, the Reverend Davis encountered the less generous biases of local people regarding their brand of theology. "I found that everybody loved to go with the multitude, and it was truly up-hill work with me. I found some who are called Anti-Mission, or Old School Baptists, who, when I called upon them, would ask of what faith I was,—and when I would reply, that I belonged to what I understood to be the Regular Baptists, they would answer, 'Then you are not of our faith,' &c." ( A Narrative of the Life of Rev. Noah Davis , p. 33). Tucker, Itinerant Preaching , pp. 105-6, 102, 129. The elaborate detail regarding sectarianism seems unique to the autobiographies. In contrast, diarists reveal everyday religious practices and opinions but don't proselytize in the same way. In part this stems from the purposes for which each kind of document was written. Sarah Metcalf Mann to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 18 February 1850; Calvin Metcalf to James Adams, 26 February 1819; Roth, The Democratic Dilemma , p. 190.

22. Horatio Chandler Diary, 2 April 1841, 27 October 1841; Sarah Beacham Diary, 7 June 1863.

23. Joseph Lye Diary, 22 March 1818, 17 February 1822; Minerva Mayo Autobiography, letter from Minerva to Jerusha Clap, 2 September 1820.

24. Ahlstrom referred to the early nineteenth century as a "sectarian heyday" ( A Religious History , ch. 29). Joseph Lye Diary, 28 December 1817. He did not attend Calvinist services—those he exhorted against—but many others. Smith, Autobiography of James L. Smith , pp. 190-91. White diarists also mention sharing a meeting house. For example, Harriet Severance discusses how Methodists, Baptists, and Congregationalists shared a meeting house with the Unitarians. The Unitarian services were the only ones Harriet would skip (Harriet Severance Diary, e.g., 6 September 1863).

25. Joseph Kimball Diary, 27 October 1844; Julia P. Stevens to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 26 September 1848; Eliza Adams to Uncle John, Adams Family Papers, 27 February 1842. Unlike Protestants, Catholics did not condone the practice of church visiting. The cultures clashed as Eliza waited to be invited into the church, and the Irishman did not know how to receive her.

26. Francis Bennett, Jr., Diary, 3 September 1854, emphasis in original.

27. Samuel Shepard James Diary, 29 November 1840. Diarists who recorded visiting both Congregational and Freewill Baptist meetings include Nathan Abbott, Ivory Hill, and Samuel Shepard James. Others attended Congregational and Baptist meetings: Lorenza Berbineau, Horatio Chandler, Susan Forbes, Joseph Kimball, and Harriet Severance. Male and female subjects did not differ in their church-visiting patterns. Some recorded going to meetings but did not specify at which church.

28. Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity , p. 9.

29. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma , p. 83. This absolutely contradicted the experience of the new religious marketplace. But the appeal of religion included the evocative images of life as it should be on earth and the promises of afterlife. See also Cott, "Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England."

30. Consumer language in the acquisition of religion is very striking, in contrast to colonial conversions. Religion was to be obtained, acquired. This consumptive terminology fit completely with the concept of a "religious marketplace."

31. Permelia Dame to George Dame, Dame Sisters Letters, 4 January 1832; Eliza Adams to Elizabeth Adams, Adams Family Papers, 1 May 1842.

32. Parna Gilbert Diary, 23 September 1848. Virginia Lieson Brereton also found death to be a stimulus for middle-class women's conversions ( From Sin to Salvation: Stories of Women's Conversions, 1800 to the Present , p. 6). Harriet Severance Diary, 1 May 1864 (emphasis in original). Ryan coined the phrase, Cradle of the Middle Class , p. 87. Lavinia Merrill to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 19 August 1840, 14 May 1841. Interestingly, the incidence of death was no greater in the antebellum period than it had been earlier. Several waves of epidemics swept through New England—not enough to change the death rate but sufficient to alter perceptions concerning the threat of death.

33. Some individuals did decide to seek religion as individuals. In her life of great hardship, Nancy Prince, at the age of 20, turned to religion to lighten the burden of trying to support her mother and brothers and sisters ( A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince , p. 17):

I resolved, in my mind, to seek an interest in my Savior, and put my trust in Him; and never shall I forget the place or time when God spake to my troubled conscience. Justified by faith I found peace with God, the forgiveness of sin through Jesus Christ my Lord. After living sixteen years without hope, and without a guide, May 6th, 1819, the Rev. Thomas Paul, baptized myself, and seven others, in obedience to the great command.

We, on him our anchor cast—
Poor and needy, lean on him,
He will bring us through at last.

However, the autobiographical accounts may convey a more individualistic message because they focus on the self, often to the exclusion of the social context. Mary Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 24 May 1846 (emphasis in original). It is interesting to note the way the process juxtaposed passivity to extreme effort. Passivity was the hallmark of Calvinist religious experience, and fervent effort was the embodiment of dissenting religious conversions. The simultaneous contradictory impulses were probably unique to the historical moment of transition between the two. Winthrop Parker wrote to his sister Rhoda Parker (21 September 1839): "Cast your sins at the foot of the cross. Christ is able to give you a new heart. You must not exspect you can save your own soul for of our selves we can do nothing all that is neces[i]ry is to have faith in the promises of God that whosoever will come to him through Jesus Christ confessing their sins he will pardon" (emphasis added). This contradiction also surfaces in the published conversion narratives of middle class women. "These Protestants believed that prospective converts must labor constantly to prepare their hearts to receive the 'operations of the spirit.' In short, conversion required of the convert both enormous effort and also the cessation of all struggle" (Brereton, From Sin to Salvation , p. 5). Philip Greven notes that Arminian religions have a different conception of free will in the conversion process: people find "salvation by the performance of religious duties, of good works, and by virtuous behavior" ( The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America , p. 87). Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity , p. 172.

34. Addle Brown to Rebecca Primus, Primus Family Papers, January 1860.

35. Charles A. Metcalf to Parents, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 27 April 1844 (emphasis in original); James Adams to Chloe Metcalf, 15 September 1822; Brown, The Life of William J. Brown , pp. 136, 141.

36. Martha Osborne Barrett Diary, 18 August 1849, emphasis in original.

37. Greven discusses the hopelessness and despair that preceded rebirths in early America: "Not until individuals could bring themselves, or be brought by God, to reject their very selves as worthless, sinful, and justly damned creatures, could they ever hope to be born again" ( The Protestant Temperament , p. 75). He later states, "The breaking of the sinner's will was the decisive culmination of the process of conversion" (p. 92). Parna Gilbert Diary, 26 September 1848. Barbara Leslie Epstein finds the gendering of the conversion experience was a primary feature distinguishing religion in the nineteenth century from that in the eighteenth. In the eighteenth century, men and women experienced conversions similarly. In the nineteenth century, men's accounts of conversion veered dramatically away from women's. Men focused on a specific act of sin whereas women condemned their sinful being ( The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America , p. 47). Among these subjects, the gender differences were not so absolute. Some men condemned their souls as well as their sins.

Epstein's explanation for the difference revolves around men's increased worldly involvement in trade and commerce. She finds women attempted to resurrect those values that capitalism was destroying, through the venue of Christianity. Evangelism endorsed cooperation, altruism, generosity, love, selfsacrifice, emotionality—those qualities the market was eroding (pp. 62-63). Sarah Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 14 December 1847 (emphasis added, except for sincere , which is underlined in the original). Brereton claims that for middle-class women it was "bad form" to express certainty. While it indeed may be a convention of the conversion formula, so much of the language of working women is saturated with insecurity and selfquestioning that I cannot help but think the process of conversion and the group pressure deeply unsettled subjects' confidence in themselves. The differences could reflect class origins. Lavinia Merrill to Rhoda Parker, Rhoda Parker Smith Correspondence, 19 August 1840 (emphasis added). Permelia Dame to George Dame, Dame Sisters Letters, 14 n.m. 1834 (emphasis added); Mary C. Metcalf to Chloe Metcalf, Metcalf-Adams Family Letters, 24 May 1846. Interestingly, for others who experienced religion, its transience did not become an issue. It came, it went, and was not mentioned again. For many subjects (e.g., Horatio Chandler, Addie Brown, and Parna Gilbert) the conversion prompted an effusive deluge of concerns about spirituality which gradually receded. The diary-keeping then returned to the pre-conversion form. We must assume that the zeal in everyday life also abated. However, when the converted subjects decided to hold fast to their beliefs, anxiety and uncertainty riddled their personal reflections.

38. Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity , p. 48. Some studies reveal that church attendance varied dramatically by gender. For example, in upstate New York, women dominated church membership and disproportionately converted to evangelical Christianity during the Second Great Awakening, across all denominations and geographic locations. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium , p. 108; Martha Tomhave Blauvelt, "Women and Revivalism," p. 1. The one exception was the Mormon faith. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform , p. 121. See also Ann Douglass, The Feminization of American Culture ; Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium , p. 108; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class , p. 81. Cott gives evidence of the predominance of female converts in the New England region, in "Young Women in the Second Great Awakening in New England," p. 15. However, working women were more likely to write in their diaries about church services and religious philosophy than men were. Forty-six percent of the women diarists in my sample recorded at least the service content, as compared to 17% of the men. And 36% of the female diarists discussed their religious philosophy, as compared to 10% of the male diarists.

39. See, for example, Smith-Rosenberg, "The Cross and the Pedestal," in Disorderly Conduct , p. 154. She clearly delineates the contradictory messages of Christianity. In this book I do not explore the ways religion encouraged women to submit to authority, to be silent, to lower self-esteem, and the like. The example of Paulina Bascorn Williams (Diary, 6 December 1831) illustrates the power of these contradictions for a woman who struggled between her piety, her conviction, and the place to which the beliefs relegated her. When she and her family moved into a new parsonage, she had nothing but complaints about it:

We have no cow & are out of provisions of every kind, & now whether it is our duty to stay in such a place after such indignity without cause or provocation is a doubt that remains to be solved. Would the Saviour have tarried with disciples that threated him thus! I certainly need a great measure of grace that my mouth may not utter perverseness.

Note that in spite of her "humility," she compared herself to Jesus in considering the inadequate circumstances and the ungrateful people with and for whom she worked. Marilyn Richardson, Black Women and Religion: A Bibliography , p. xv. For a discussion of the role of contemporary African American women in the church, see Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, "'Together in Harness': Women's Traditions in the Sanctified Church," and the narratives of female ministers, such as Almond H. Davis, ed., The Female Preacher, or Memoir of Salome Lincoln ; Rebecca Jackson, Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress ; Jarena Lee, Religious Experience and Journal of Mrs. Jarena Lee, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel ; and Nancy Towle, Vicissitudes Illustrated, in the Experience of Nancy Towle, in Europe and America .

40. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium , p. 97.

41. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform , p. 113. Alexis de Tocqueville also discusses voluntarism at length in Democracy in America .

42. See, for example, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class . In the 1830s and 1840s in particular, the explosion of organizations included maternal associations, Bible societies, missionary societies, anti-slavery societies, and female moral reform associations. The women's rights movement also grew out of the antebellum period. A self-selected group of women who were active in the antislavery crusade attended the Seneca Falls convention in 1848, which, like the moral reform societies, was largely a middle-class phenomenon. Mary Orne Tucker, the wife of a Methodist minister, joined and became president of a female moral reform society in Massachusetts. The number of women involved in collective sewing endeavors was much greater. This figure reflects only those who were a part of formal organizations.

43. As important as the principles were, in secular reform as in spiritual, the social dimension played an important role. Martha Barrett, one of the two white anti-slavery activists, said after attending the Anti-Slavery Society convention in Boston in 1851, "Enjoyed it very much indeed. Not only the addresses, but meeting so many friends" (Diary, 4 June 1851). Seven years later and still involved, she made plans to go to the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society quarterly meeting. "Am anticipating much pleasure, not only from listening to the speaking, but also in meeting some esteemed friends" (15 December 1858). Only two subjects—Sarah Holmes Clark and Marcella Holmes—expressed proslavery opinions. Both of them moved to Georgia in the 1850s. This period was not covered by Pamela Brown Dix's diary, unfortunately. See preface to the published diaries, Blanche Brown Bryant and Gertrude Elaine Baker, eds., The Diaries of Sally and Pamela Brown, 1832-1838, Hyde Leslie, 1887, Plymouth Notch, Vermont , p. 4. Many ex-slaves wrote their narratives out of an expressed desire to end slavery, Free blacks in the North could not deny their connection to brothers and sisters in chains in the South the way that whites could.

Ex-slaves and women faced hostile opposition to their prominent place in the public eye and to their expression of radical opinions. Black and white abolitionists were called names, confronted physical threats, and lost their jobs or homes. James L. Smith wrote, "Brickbats and rotten eggs were very common in those days; an anti-slavery lecturer was often showered by them. Slavery at this time had a great many friends" ( Autobiography of James L. Smith , p. 185). On one lecture circuit through Connecticut and Massachusetts, James L. Smith and his traveling companion, Dr. Osgood, found their horse mutilated by proslavery locals. But former slaves and free blacks in the North also faced possible kidnapping and deportation to the South, where they could be sold or returned to their former owners (especially after Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850).

White abolitionists encountered animosity as well, the outspoken women in particular. Agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society Abigail Kelley braved character assassination, barrages of rotten fruits and vegetables, and occasional physical threats because of her outspokenness. Abolitionists themselves were deeply divided on "the woman question." The national American Anti-Slavery Society split over the rights of women within the organization in 1840. See Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Antislavery .

That said, many people supported the activism of women for a moral cause, and others "excused" activist women. Melissa Doloff wrote in her diary about seeing Julia Ward Howe lecture in 1858:

She spoke very well indeed. Some think it very much out of place for a lady to be a public speaker, and I think myself that it is rather out of their sphere. But if they think it their duty to be a public speaker, I think there is no impropriety in it. This lady seemed to be very sincere in her remarks and very earnest that the poor slave should be liberated. (Diary, 9 September 1858)

44. In his diary entry of 5 December 1840, Horatio Chandler carefully recorded the Temperance Society Pledge that he had recently taken:

Beleiving that the evils resulting to our community from the use of intoxicating drinks, are more pervading and intense than those flowing from any other of the dark sources of misery which vice opens upon us—beleiving it to be our duty, by the obligations which rest upon us in our different capacities of patriots, philanthropists, and Christians, to use our best endearours to eradicate those evils—& beleiving, also, that the best mode of effecting this great object is the exercise of a moral influence in an organized form:—therefore, we the undersigned, do agree that we will not use any intoxicating liquors, as a beverage, nor traffic in them; that we will not provide them as an article of entertainment, as for persons in our employment; & that in all suitable ways, we will discountenance their use throughout the community.

Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity , p. 89. Joseph Kimball Diary, 4 March 1833. Abigail Baldwin recorded another lost battle in 1853 in Plymouth, Vermont: "Freeman's meeting, great excitement, rum or no rum. Mr. Joselyn chosen as representative, a particular friend of Mr. Alcohol, arch enemy of sobriety" (Diary, 4 September 1853). David Clapp, Journal of David Clapp , p. 22. Hannah Adams to Father and Mother, Adams Family Papers, 14 November 1841. She signed the letter, "your dutiful daughter, H. T. Adams."

45. Toward the middle and end of the nineteenth century, as the flood of immigrants swelled, the temperance issue only superficially veiled anti-immigrant prejudice. Francis Bennett commented on the havoc wreaked by a mob in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that vandalized a store selling rum that was kept by an Irishman (Diary, 4 May 1852).

1. Louisa Chapman Diary, 16 April 1848, emphasis added.

2. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering ; Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework ; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking ; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework , to name a few. Some feminists also hold public life in great esteem and assert that "consciousness and personality are apt to develop most fully through a stance of civic responsibility and an orientation to the collective whole" (Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology," p. 398). Others more forcefully assert the importance of the public as the seat of all power, where men make important decisions. See, for example, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class ; Stansell, City of Women ; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

3. However, historians have successfully documented women's involvement in the public sphere over time, which until the past twenty years had been systematically buried and forgotten. "Women's involvements in exchange transactions, in informal women's communities, and in urban kin networks are now interpreted as having significance for extra-domestic arrangements rather than as mere extensions of women's domestic orientation" (Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups," p. 191).

4. Anna Yeatman, "Gender and the Differentiation of Social Life into Public and Private Domains," p. 43. She criticizes feminists such as Michelle Rosaldo, and, by inference, Linda Imray and Audrey Middleton for analytically conflating the terms when they are attempting to distinguish gender differentiation from public/domestic differentiation. Imray and Middleton, "Public and Private: Marking the Boundaries."

5. Both Osterud in Bonds of Community and Motz in True Sisterhood emphasize the importance of kin networks in particular as safety nets for women in the case of death of, desertion by, or mistreatment by their breadwinners.

6. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

1. All, that is, until the group of diaries reached a critical mass. Men's diaries were more abundant and easier to locate. Several years into the project, I stopped looking for more men's diaries and intensified my search for women's diaries in order to match their numbers. Charles Stephenson notes that such a hypothesis has yet to be fully explored in the American context, although it can be taken for granted in the British one ("A Gathering of Strangers? Mobility, Social Structure, and Political Participation in the Formation of Nineteenth-Century American Workingclass Culture," p. 35).

2. Betsey Clark Diary, 6 June 1855, 6 August 1855; Nathaniel Clark Diary, 20 July 1848; DeBow, Statistical View of the United States, 7th Census , p. 169. I leave it to future studies to determine the most appropriate cutoff point in determining the class status of farmers. For the time being, I want to conservatively cluster those farmers, artisans, and unskilled laborers whose options were limited, and who were more similar to the majority of the population of antebellum New England.

3. I acknowledge the importance of more explicitly analyzing the language itself, but that project would lead to an entirely different book. I hope that someone else will undertake such a project, now that I have brought these sources to light.

4. DeBow, Statistical View of the United States, Seventh Census , calculated from pp. lxi and 2-77. Preservation is another potential source of bias—some people's papers are saved and others not. The scarcity of documents makes the research more challenging but not impossible.

5. Ronald J. Zboray, "The Letter and the Fiction Reading Public in Antebellum America; pp. 28, 29.

6. Motz, True Sisterhood , p. 55. That said, however, when she generalizes about the content of women's versus men's letters she finds that men mostly discussed political and economic issues, while women discussed community and familial matters, emotions, and opinions of other people. She also maintains that once men married they relied on their wives to continue correspondence with their own mothers, sisters, and brothers, except when writing about business.

7. Zboray has similarly found letters between middle-class men, married and single, to transcend sexual stereotypes and to be "rich in complex, emotional expressions" ("The Letter and the Fiction Reading Public in Antebellum America," pp. 33-34, n. 11). One problem of Motz's research, as Zboray points out, is that she disproportionately uses sources from the late nineteenth century without discussing the dramatic cultural shift over the century and the impact it must have had on letter-writing conventions. Thus, her analysis becomes less useful in examining early-nineteenth-century sources. Also, as Osterud points out, she did not read correspondence between men and women ( Bonds of Community , p. 7).

8. For example, see Thomas Dublin, ed., Farm to Factory: Women's Letters, 1830-1860 . See also issues of Vermont History and Historical New Hampshire. For an excellent collection of African-American letters, see Dorothy Sterling, ed., We Are Your Sisters . Another critical source of letters written by African Americans includes those written to newspapers and to organizations, such as the American Colonization Society and the numerous anti-slavery societies around the country. Carter Godwin Woodson, The Mind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the Crisis, 1800-1860 . Letters written for publication in newspapers such as William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator or Frederick Douglass's North Star assume a public audience and focus on politics much more than on relationships and family issues. Therefore, for my purposes these letters were informative but not useful for reconstructing everyday life.

9. Margo Culley, A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present , p. 3. The diary that most clearly fits this format is that of Charles Benson, who wrote his diary as a series of letters to his wife while he was away at sea. Subjects regularly circulated letters within a household and among neighbors. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood , p. 16; Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale .

10. A[rthur] Bennett Diary, 18 March 1844; Sarah Trask Diary, in cover of journal, 1849; Edward Jenner Carpenter Diary, 1 March 1844; Ann Julia Stoddard Diary, 10 July 1866.

11. Charles Benson Diary; Sarah Trask Diary, 14 August 1849; Mary Mudge Diary, 1 March 1854.

12. Culley, A Day at a Time , pp. 7, 3. Although her explanation differs, Culley's characterization of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century diaries almost identically matches that of Motz's rural dwellers and Hampsten's working-class women. These diaries, which Motz refers to as the literary diaries, "focus on the diarist as a unique individual and relate the writer's anxieties, concerns, and emotional reactions to events both personal and national. These diaries represent, in other words, an attempt to differentiate the self from society" (Marilyn Ferris Motz, "Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19thCentury Midwestern Rural Diaries," p. 132).

13. Motz, ibid., pp. 140, 132.

12. Culley, A Day at a Time , pp. 7, 3. Although her explanation differs, Culley's characterization of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century diaries almost identically matches that of Motz's rural dwellers and Hampsten's working-class women. These diaries, which Motz refers to as the literary diaries, "focus on the diarist as a unique individual and relate the writer's anxieties, concerns, and emotional reactions to events both personal and national. These diaries represent, in other words, an attempt to differentiate the self from society" (Marilyn Ferris Motz, "Folk Expression of Time and Place: 19thCentury Midwestern Rural Diaries," p. 132).

13. Motz, ibid., pp. 140, 132.

14. Elizabeth Hampsten, Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880-1910 , p. 27. She contrasts this to men, who have exhibited sensitivity to regional location. Only class and upward mobility shaped women's language. Women of leisure "remove[d] themselves farther from the experience they describe[d]" (p. 27). Hampsten asserts that the language women used reveals their class status better than education or income, in contrast to what was true for men. And working-class language reflects the quagmire of everyday work life.

15. The only real exception involves those diaries wholly consumed with religious reflection. They often began with a religious conversion and continued to use the journal as a forum for spiritual exploration. In these cases, the social drops away; and for that reason I have excluded them from this study.

16. The contrast between these two diarists was the focus of an unsigned article, ''Two Men, Two New Hampshire Towns, Two Sets of Diaries," New Hampshire Historical Society Newsletter 23:4 (July/August, 1985): 1-2.

17. C. Vann Woodward, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), p. xvi; David Clapp Journal, 13 May 1822; Clapp, Journal of David Clapp, p. 1.

18. Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: New and Selected Stories (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988), p. 380. Female authors account for only 12% of all slave narratives published (Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women's Autobiography: From Antiquity to the Present, p. 7). Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative.

19. Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives; Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, p. 1. Sympathetic treatment of select white people combined with a criticism of the institution of slavery repeatedly emerge as themes in many slave narratives. See, for example, in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, the first of Douglass's three autobiographies, how he describes the change in his new mistress's behavior once she discovers the power of owning someone. In the beginning she considerately treats Douglass like a human being, but once corrupted, she makes him a target of her wrath. "She at first lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness. It was at least necessary for her to have some training in the exercise of irresponsible power, to make her equal to the task of treating me as though I were a brute" (p. 39). This account showed how slavery could turn a "pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman" (p. 39) into an insensitive, exploitative, sadistic monster. The theme of institutional corruption was no doubt more amenable to a northern audience than a sentiment which asserted the natural depravity of white people. Foster, Witnessing Slavery, p. 6. Also see Joanne M. Braxton, Black Women Writing Autobiography: A Tradition within a Tradition, p. 27. For example, Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, In a Two-Story White House, North. Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There .

20. Foster, Witnessing Slavery, p. 74. William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865, p. 6. Stephen Butterfield writes, "The slave narrator had little choice but to adapt the literary forms and traditions of white American culture" ( Black Autobiography in America, p. 47). "Because they summarize what white abolitionist sponsors sought in the antislavery texts they would publish, they indicate the institutional conditions under which many of the narratives were composed" (John Sekora, "Black Message / White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative," p. 495).

21. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story, p. 2. In his provocative essay "Black Message/White Envelope" (p. 484), John Sekora asks: Whose voice do the autobiographies represent? He argues that the antebellum slave narratives are not part of the autobiographical tradition because they are not about the self (the critical feature of autobiography, as Sekora sees it). The black self must be denied in slave narratives, being replaced by a white voice (p. 510). In her study of black women's autobiographies, Joanne M. Braxton views the genre as evolving: "As a group, these autobiographies reflect a shift from the preoccupation with survival found in the slave narratives to a need for self-expression and self-identification" ( Black Women Writing Autobiography, p. 10). Other writers and historians claim the slave narrative as the first form of a distinctive African American literature, despite the conditions under which it was produced. In this study, four of the autobiographies were written during the antebellum period by former slaves and two by freeborn African Americans. The remaining seven were written after the Civil War. The slave narratives discuss daily life in a stable free community less than do the autobiographies of free blacks or the narratives written later in the century.

22. Foster, Witnessing Slavery . Publication tends to emphasize the sensational or colorful events in an individual's life, while minimizing the routine and mundane. This makes autobiography fundamentally different from letters and diaries. It anticipates and seeks a large audience.

23. I draw on the published autobiographies of two white millgirls, a farmer, and a woman married to an itinerant Methodist minister. Harriet H. Robinson, Loom and Spindle; Or, Life Among the Early Mill Girls with a Sketch of "The Lowell Offering" and Some of Its Contributors; Lucy Larcom, A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory; Asa Sheldon, Yankee Drover: Being the Unpretending Life of ASA SHELDON, Farmer, Trader, and Working Man, 1788-1870 ; and Mary Orne Tucker, Itinerant Preaching . In addition, Minerva Mayo, a young woman living in Orange, Massachusetts, wrote a short document that she labeled an autobiography but did not write for publication. Her retrospective is only a few pages long. It then drops its initial focus and becomes a copy book, mostly containing letters.

24. See, for example, John W. Adams and Alice Bee Kasakoff, "Estimates of Census Underenumeration Based on Genealogies"; Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History ; Peter R. Knights, "Potholes in the Road of Improvement? Estimating Census Underenumeration by Longitudinal Tracing: U.S. Censuses"; Donald H. Parkerson, "Comments on the Underenumeration of the U.S. Census, 1850-1880."