“This middle-class country had got a middle-class president, at last,” Ralph Waldo Emerson had noted with satisfaction when Lincoln took office in 1861. Lincoln, in contrast to the presidents who had been wealthy planters or businessmen or high-ranking military men, was a self-made man who embraced middle-class values. Middle-class culture took the best aspects of romanticism—the enshrinement of human potential, the restless striving for personal betterment, the zest for competition and excitement— and tempered them with a passion for self-control and regularity.
But the Civil War sapped middle-class culture of its reforming zeal. The vital energy that invigorated antebellum reforms and had impelled the North to war became dissipated by that war. Afterwards, middle-class Americans focused their energies on building institutions. American society and culture underwent a process of “incorporation,” as the predominant form of the business world seeped deep into the American consciousness.
No institution was more central to middle-class life than the family. After the Civil War, it lost some of its moral fervor but gained a new substantiality.
The Breakfast (1911), by William McGregor Paxton, shows a middle-class husband, absorbed in the newspaper and in the world beyond the home. His wife, in a gorgeous dress, sits—very much a "bird in a gilded cage,” the title of a popular song in 1900. The servant girl, face unseen, cleans up the cage. Source: The Breakfast, William McGregor Paxton, American, 1911 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U. S.A. Image copyright ©The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Increasingly family life was defined in terms of tangible goods: especially large houses, which were crowded with furniture, books, lamps, and all manner of decorative objects. Modern scholars have often indicted this “culture of consumption” for its superficiality, a criticism commonly aired by patrician elites at the time. But no attack on middle-class culture and its conspicuous consumption surpassed the venom of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Veblen contended that consumers derived little real pleasure from their big homes and gaudy purchases; they were simply showing off their wealth. Fashionable clothes, for example, induced “aesthetic nausea,” prompting women to soon discard them. No one was ever satisfied with their wealth because everyone else was scrambling to get ahead of them. Everyone wanted more.
Middle-class people regarded the matter differently. They conceived of the family as a refuge from the increasingly chaotic and unsavory aspects of urban life: A beautiful house that was filled with books, paintings, and musical instruments would inculcate the finer sensibilities and elevate the minds of its occupants. Better for children to find stimulation at home than to visit the vice districts or unsupervised amusements downtown. The abundant material culture of the “Victorian age” reflected not its superficiality but its solidity.
Modern historians have often denounced the middle-class family as emotionally stiff and, in matters pertaining to sexuality, downright prudish. But diaries and letters provide ample proof that many couples experienced emotionally intense and sexually fulfilling relationships. Elaborate and protracted courtship rituals intensified the expression of love by delaying its gratification. Middle-class mothers at the end of the century had two or three children, four or five fewer than their grandmothers. Their families were smaller mostly because they married later in life and practiced abstinence, though during the last half of the century contraceptive devices were both more reliable and more available commercially.
While most women remained home to supervise their children and to preside over the private world of the family, men worked away from home, in shops and offices. Members of the professions and the large and diffuse groups of shopkeepers, small manufacturers, skilled craftsmen, and established farmers that made up the middle class lived in varying degrees of comfort. A family with an annual income of $1,000 in the 1880s would have no need to skimp on food, clothing, or shelter. When Professor Woodrow Wilson moved with his family to Wesleyan University in 1888, he was able to rent a large house and employ two full-time servants on his salary of $2,500 a year. Indeed, at this time, about a quarter of all urban families employed at least one servant.
The presence of servants showed that the middle-class family was never wholly “private.” Husbands, of course, left the house each day to work in the businesses that provided the economic rationale for cities; but wives also made recurrent forays into the public world in order to shop, visit parks and museums, and participate in charitable and social organizations.
World History
