Marriage and family life in the mid - to late 19th-century United States represented the stability needed to anchor a dynamic and fluid society. The home represented a “haven in a heartless world” and was dominated largely by women and children. Moreover, law, custom, and social practices protected the institution of marriage and family life. Divorce was rare and difficult to obtain, and the vast majority of people were married and had children. Although the family was not strictly “political,” it was considered the main foundation for sustaining the uniquely democratic republic that was the United States of America.
As market capitalism spread throughout much of the country, more and more families were drawn into commercial farming or moved into the rapidly expanding urban areas. Men and women were no longer working side by side on the farm, growing their own food, and making all or most of their necessities. Increasingly, men were characterized as rugged individualists, up-and-coming ambitious capitalists expected to succeed in the public sphere. Women, on the other hand, assumed a powerful role in the home, defined as the private sphere. They had more time now because they could buy their own and the families’ clothes and many other luxuries that did not require physical labor. Women were expected to use that extra time to instruct their children in Christian morality and values. From this kind of benevolent but educative home, the children would emerge as moral upright citizens.
Thus, the economic changes that swept the country also shaped the cultural traditions of its citizens. Courtship, marriage, and the family became individualized and private to a much larger degree than had previously existed. This spirit of individualism affected marriage practices. The ideal of romantic love combined with the market system seemed to offer young men and women greater freedom in their marriage choices.
Middle-class husbands and wives viewed one another as partners in a “companionate marriage.” Children were regarded as individuals who required love, nurture, and special EDUCATION. Parents were very conscientious about child rearing and child development. The father assumed the position of sole breadwinner for the family, and the wife reared the children. Women were defined as morally superior to men and were now looked to as the guardians of civilization.
Mothers played an active role in the lives of their sons by instilling in them a moral conscience. Although the middle-class household became the domain of the mother, fathers continued to play an active role in their children’s lives. Fathers were also advisers and disciplinarians, especially to their sons. The primary goal of both parents was to develop the child’s conscience and his and her ability for self-government.
During an earlier period, children were trained to fear authority; in the 19th century, more indulgent and kindly parents taught their children to have the capacity for selfcontrol but also to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Several historians have argued that with the emergence of individualism and society’s new focus on personal advancement, 19th-century couples actively practiced contraception to ensure that they produced a smaller family for whom they could provide materially and emotionally.
At the same time, the family slowly lost its productive function as subsistence farming gave way to a reliance on factory-produced goods and a growing consumer EcoNOMY. This change neither happened overnight nor did it occur at the same speed everywhere in the United States. Large numbers of people, including pioneer families, working - class and immigrant families in both the cities and the countryside, and slave families, had very different expectations and experiences. In general, however, middle-class marriage and family patterns were influential on every social stratum.
The small nuclear family fostered intense emotional ties between its members, especially as the line between public and private became more defined and as society and the economy became more specialized. The home became a place where mothers, fathers, and children found spiritual guidance, emotional support, and physical sustenance. The home became a place that nurtured and protected its members from a possibly immoral and definitely acquisitive world. This sentiment was summed up perfectly in one of the most popular songs of the era, “Home! Sweet Home!”: “‘Mid pleasure and Palaces though we may roam; Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home!”
Further reading: Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolution to the Victorians (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1999); Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: Free Press, 1988).
—Patricia Richard
Marx, Karl (1 81 8-1 883) political philosopher, author Writer and political philosopher Karl Marx offered a powerful critique of industrial capitalism and called for socialism. His ideology, known as marxism, had widespread influence both in his own era and later in communist regimes, notably in Russia and China. Less well known is Marx’s short stint as a journalist covering the American CiViL War.
Born in the Rhineland, (now Germany) to a comfortable middle-class family, he attended the universities in Bonn and Berlin. When he was banned from universities because of his participation in extremist political organizations, he turned to JOURNALISM. Throughout his life he wrote for and edited many different radical journals. Moving to France in the 1840s after one such journal was banned, he continued researching, writing, and working out his theories on the one hand and organizing European social movements on the other. He formed a lifelong partnership with fellow revolutionary theorist Frederick Engels. Exiled in 1849, he moved to London with his wife and children, where he lived the rest of his life.
Marx spurned religious explanations in favor of a detailed scientific system based on the material conditions of production. His work contained the idea of predictable stages. Workers, he argued, were economically exploited and morally alienated. These wrongs would lead to a class struggle and the overthrow of capitalism. In a more humane communist society, which he considered the last stage of civilization, human beings could develop their natural gifts freely in cooperation with others. A prodigious writer, his evolving ideas were published in more than 50 volumes. Among his most noteworthy books are Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Capital (1867). His activist legacy was the First International.
Marx’s work was an inspiration to U. S. anarchist and socialist groups active in the late 19th-century protest movements, such as the labor rally for the eight-hour day. Marx, who for 10 years was a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, wrote trenchant essays on the political and economic causes of the Civil War as well as the military campaigns. A strong Unionist, he believed that Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party would bring a new hope for the working-class people in the United States and throughout the world. In an address to Lincoln, Marx wrote: “The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American antislavery war will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead the country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.”
Further reading: William Ecenbarger, Walkin’ the Line: A Journey from Past to Present along the Mason-Dixon (New York: M. Evans, 2000).
—Martha Kadue
Further reading: Saul K. Padover, ed., Karl Marx on America and the Civil War (New York: McGraw Hill, 1972); Francis Wheen, Karl Marx: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
—Jaclyn Greenberg
World History
