In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century (review)

In 1839, Marianne Cochran, a middling resident of Northampton, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to one of her female kin contrasting the modest social gatherings of her hometown with an elaborate party hosted by bourgeois Bostonians at which "a bouquet was placed at every plate & after meats &c all adjourned to another room & table for the dessert!" (185). Cochran's none-too-subtle implication was that the sort of sociability, and by extension the whole way of life, carried out "in the New England fashion" abided as a virtuous alternative to, and even constituted a bulwark against, the decadence infecting early-nineteenth-century urban society and culture. It is this tension between country and city, continuity and change, particularly as it was experienced, constructed, contested, and conveyed by women of the rural antebellum Northeast, that Catherine E. Kelly ponders and probes in her provocative and absorbing book. In the New England Fashion explores the many facets of rural women's lives, including housework, domestic service, kinship, friendship, education, romantic love, marriage, participation in the public sphere, fashion, and consumption, so as to propose new ways of thinking about "the reshaping of rural class relations, the origins of the northern middle class, and the critical role played by gender and culture in each" (11). With the intersection among gender, class, and culture at the center of her analysis, Kelly pushes the boundaries of labor, social, and women's history to challenge a number of core conclusions about the transformation to a market society in the antebellum North. One of her more important contributions is her thoughtful documentation of the way in which the rise of a provincial middle class "initially worked to resist, then to complicate, and finally to mask the encroachments" (11) of the social and economic changes wrought by the development of early capitalism. As significant is the relationship she posits between social and intellectual history. Reading letters and diaries, friendship and commonplace books, and published prose and poetry for what they reveal about both experience and representation, Kelly insists that we take women seriously as actors and thinkers, whose daily lives and the meanings they made of them at once signified and effected important changes in gender and class identities, roles, and relations.

In the years from 1820 to 1860, rural New Englanders experienced and helped to facilitate the "Great Transformation" (5), the shift from a household economy to a market society. Household production, face-to-face transactions within the local community, barter, and flexible credit gave way, albeit gradually and unevenly, to a new economic order marked by capitalized manufacturing, commercialized agriculture, industrial production, long-distance trade, cash exchange, and the wage system. At the same time, the old values and expectations that had organized the corporate household and community—hierarchy, mutuality, and interdependence—were increasingly challenged by a newer set that prized individualism, domesticity, and genteel refinement. The labors, practices, beliefs, and ideas of provincial middling women, Kelly argues, constituted the front lines of negotiation between the old economic, social, and cultural order and the new. Such women also furthered the great irony of the process of transformation. In the absence of clear occupational or residential markers of class status, rural middling women helped the provincial middle class define itself by distinguishing the traditional virtues of the household from the ways of life of the urban bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the rural poor, on the other. The former maneuver served to obscure the provincial middle class's self-interested accommodation to economic and social change. The latter more overtly hardened growing class distinctions. Both, Kelly maintains, contributed to broader middle-class hegemony in a growing capitalist society. In addition, rural middling women's experiences of and articulations about mediating the transition from household to market society "inscribed in the heart of national identity...