Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics

FREE HEARTS AND FREE HOMES

GENDER AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Coeditors

Thadious M. Davis

Linda K. Kerber

Editorial Advisory Board

Nancy Cott

Cathy N. Davidson

Jane Sherron De Hart

Sara Evans

Mary Kelley

Annette Kolodny

Wendy Martin

Nell Irvin Painter

Janice Radway

Barbara Sicherman

FREE HEARTS AND FREE HOMES

Gender and American Antislavery Politics

MICHAEL D. PIERSON

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2003 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Monotype Ehrhardt

by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pierson, Michael D.

Free hearts and free homes: gender and American

antislavery politics / Michael D. Pierson.

p. cm.—(Gender & American culture)

Based on author’s thesis (doctoral)—State University

of New York, Binghamton.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2782-7 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-5455-7 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Antislavery movements—United States—

History—19th century. 2. United States—Politics

and government—1849–1861. 3. Political

parties—United States—History—19th

century. 4. Women abolitionists—United States—

History—19th century. 5. Sex role—Political

aspects—United States—History—19th

century. 6. Women in politics—United States—

History—19th century. 7. Political culture—

United States—History—19th century.

I. Title. II. Series.

E449 .P615 2003 326’.8’0973—dc21 2002153534

cloth 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

paper 07 06 05 04 03 5 4 3 2 1

For

Jane Church Pierson

and

Laura Barefield

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Liberty Party Gender Ideologies

CHAPTER TWO

From Liberty to Free Soil: Gender and Emancipation

CHAPTER THREE

Antislavery Women and the Triumph of Domestic Feminism

CHAPTER FOUR

Democrats and the Defense of Patriarchy

CHAPTER FIVE

Gender in the 1856 Republican Campaign

CHAPTER SIX

Republican Women and the 1856 Election

CHAPTER SEVEN

Republican Gender Ideology in 1860

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Free Love and women’s rights advocates as supporters of John Frémont 117

James Buchanan shown as willing to change his political clothes 123

Feminists and Free Lovers as Republican constituents in 1860 128

Jessie Benton Frémont celebrated as Our Jessie 147

Liberty, the Fair Maid of Kansas 149

Anti-Frémont cartoon ridiculing Republicans’ ‘Bleeding Kansas’ Fund 151

Similar depictions of Mary Todd Lincoln and Mrs. D. 167

The Lincolns in a respectable parlor 171

Charles Sumner delivering his Barbarism of Slavery speech 178

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK IS THE product of a long journey both geographically and personally. Along the way, I have been helped by a wide variety of people who exemplify all that is best about our collective and individual search for understanding our past. As an undergraduate at Gettysburg College, I changed, perhaps ironically, from a reader of Civil War miliary history into a historian interested in the interactions between society and politics. Most important to this process were the courses I took with Norman Forness, who showed me just how much we could, and could not, know about nineteenth-century America. Since my graduation he has continued to read and respond critically and energetically to my writings. My thanks go also to Gabor Boritt and Michael Birkner for encouraging and supporting my career; Michael in particular shepherded my work on Jane Grey Swisshelm through the editing process of Pennsylvania History.

Free Hearts and Free Homes began its life as my dissertation at SUNY-Binghamton under the direction of Sarah Elbert. Sarah is a rare mentor. All of her students know her for her ethics and integrity, as well as for her compassion and understanding. Over the last twelve years, she has demonstrated to me her unswerving commitment to women, gender studies, and social justice. Her critical acumen and broad-ranging knowledge of the nineteenth-century United States have made me a better thinker and this a better book.

Several scholars very generously read the manuscript in its entirety at various stages of its development. As members of my graduate committee, Kathryn Kish Sklar and Bernard Rosenthal asked many probing questions. Richard Dalfiume, in addition to his guidance on the manuscript, was a constant source of advice, good cheer, and lunch. Richard H. Sewell welcomed me to Madison and read chapters in progress during my days researching and writing at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Readings by Nancy A. Hewitt and James Brewer Stewart helped me very much in transforming this project into book form. As a manuscript reviewer for the press, Julie Roy Jeffery helped me to reconceptualize the Introduction and pin down several key terms.

My academic journey has been a peripatetic one, and my thanks go to all those who read and commented on my work along the way, including: Brett Barker, Norma Basch, Frederick Blue, Janet Coryell, Scott Casper, Gene Forderhase, Ronald Formisano, Stanley Harrold, Mary Kelley, Laura McInaney, Jane Pease, John Quist, Stacey Robertson, Beth Salerno, Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, Vernon Volpe, Judith Wellman, Ronald Zboray, and Mary Saracino Zboray. Many of my colleagues at Illinois State University, Henderson State University, and Eastern Kentucky University welcomed my wife and me into their communities and gave friendly support to my efforts to teach often heavy loads and still continue my research. As I think about these years, I realize that this list could become very long indeed, but I thank especially Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, David Chesebrough, John Graves, Nancy Forderhase, A. G. Dunston and David Sefton. As I resettle in my New England home, I thank my Americanist colleagues Caryn Cossé Bell, Dean Bergeron, Mary Blewett, Charles Carroll, Shehong Chen, Melissa Pennell, and Tony Szczesiul for making the University of Massachusetts at Lowell a wonderful place to study American history, literature, and culture.

Much of this project was researched and initially drafted at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Several members of the library staff deserve my thanks. Ellen Burke of the Interlibrary Loan office tenaciously and successfully pursued sources long after I abandoned hope of their discovery. John Peters generously gave me workspace close to the society’s splendid holdings. Carol Clemente of the Bartle Interlibrary Loan office tracked down numerous sources for me. Early financial support from a SUNY-Binghamton dissertation research award speeded my research considerably. In addition, I have received generous support from the George and Catherine Peacock Memorial Fund. I also appreciate the assistance of the Henderson State University Faculty Development grant program which enabled me to travel to the American Antiquarian Society to complete research on the Liberty Party.

Most of Chapter 2 has appeared in Slavery and Abolition, and an earlier draft of Chapter 4 was published in Gender and History. In addition, many of the ideas published here about Jane Swisshelm were first published in Pennsylvania History. I would like to thank these journals for graciously allowing me to reprint my work here.

At the University of North Carolina Press, I am grateful to Chuck Grench, Amanda McMillan, and Ruth Homrighaus for guiding my manuscript through the processes of evaluation and publication with consummate professionalism and good cheer. I also wish to thank an anonymous reader for the press for his/her support of my work.

Friends and family make research and writing easier and more fun. Timothy Houlihan’s company made spending glorious upstate New York summer days in the dark microfilm room of the SUNY-Binghamton library much easier to bear. I also remember Francesca Sawaya and Josh Piker’s anthropological analyses of life in central Illinois. My mom, Jane Church Pierson, has been there through all my life’s changes, writing, calling, and driving to visit me no matter what state I lived in. Also, thank you to my colleagues Mary Kramer and Tony Szczesiul for helping to proofread the final page proof. Since we first met at Gettysburg, I have walked seemingly endless miles of battlefield park and professional and domestic life with Laura Bare-field. She has heard and read every word many times and has made all the difference in the paths we have traveled together.

FREE HEARTS AND FREE HOMES

INTRODUCTION

OCTOBER 16, 1856, was a beautiful fall day in the Hudson River Valley. The air was light and chilly and the foliage a golden brown. From the top of Forbus Hill on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie, people could scan the valley until the landscape dissolved into a shroud of blue haze that obscured the horizon line. Picturesque sailboats decorated the Hudson. To the North and East of Forbus Hill, there were still-green fields and groves, thriving villages, and a rolling countryside.

At least 15,000 people convened on Forbus Hill that afternoon to hear speakers during the Republican Party’s Mass Meeting of the River Counties. Starting at 2:30, the crowd listened to speeches about what legislative steps the Republicans would take if the party won the election. For three hours the speakers, led by United States Senator Henry Wilson and including German-speaking orators, entertained an audience jammed before them on a six-acre plot of land. Widely disseminated by speakers and by partisan newspapers, the legislative positions of Republican politicians such as the ones who spoke at Poughkeepsie have been studied extensively by historians.¹ Typically, scholars have explained what the Republican Party stood for by looking at political platforms, editorials, and speeches; they have focused on issues such as the extension of slavery, immigration, tariffs, the rights of free blacks, and other matters before Congress and the courts. The high voter turnouts of the antebellum period stemmed, they have argued, from the importance of these issues and the clear choices that the parties offered on them.

But the Mass Meeting of the River Counties and other similar affairs included much more than just the policy statements of the official speakers. By 9 A.M. families began to convene in downtown Poughkeepsie, answering the Republicans’ call that the day be not only a party affair but a holiday and festival for the entire people. Soon, ordinary Republicans paraded through the downtown to the riverfront, where they met steamboats bearing delegations from New York City, Brooklyn, and Albany. Winding their way back through the city, the parade, now accompanied by glee clubs and bands, reached Forbus Hill only just in time for the scheduled start of the speeches. Throughout the town, streamers, flags, and banners hung from windows and stretched across Poughkeepsie’s streets. From doors and balconies, women and children cheered the parade’s marching men, wagonloads of women, and men on horseback. There was, the New York Daily Times reported, "an indescribable melange of sounds indicative of serious purpose and popular rejoicing."²

The planned grand cavalcade through the streets helped shape Republican Party political culture long before Senator Wilson was announced to speak. During the hours of prespeech events, the Republican rank and file fashioned their own political culture, one that integrated the shared social and cultural beliefs of antislavery voters. These social and cultural underpinnings of antislavery politics—including its ideas about proper gender roles—have been less thoroughly investigated by historians than the party’s positions on congressional legislation.³

Undoubtedly, many voters responded to party positions on the issues. For example, Republicans went to great lengths to explain their formulas for blocking the expansion of slavery into Kansas and other western territories. However, some nineteenth-century voters took the label of Republican or Democrat as part of their personal identity, as a lifelong commitment to, and identification with, that party. They often maintained their party identity even in the face of changing candidates, new issues, and occasional policy reversals. This voter behavior suggests that antebellum political parties may have succeeded in identifying themselves with a larger constellation of cultural identities or values that complemented or even transcended the issues or candidates directly before the voters in any given election. For example, historians have shown that certain religious and ethnic groups overwhelmingly supported one specific party.⁴ While such partisan allegiance may have had legislative roots—Catholics might have voted Democratic because that party adopted stands on religious freedom and the public school system that Catholics generally approved of—a voter would also reinforce his cultural identity by belonging to a party that incorporated his ethnic or religious group. In this way, parties became linked to certain ethnic identities in ways that included issue-oriented politics but also went beyond that to encompass personal identity. Gender functioned in similar ways; as the antebellum parties expressed opinions about their gender beliefs, voters came to identify themselves with those broad cultural positions in ways that reinforced legislative priorities but also spoke to voters about core issues of identity. This book argues that antebellum Republicans and Democrats articulated cogent, diverse stands on gender roles and family practices, and that many people who assumed a partisan identity did so in part because they understood the party’s gender culture and identified themselves with that worldview.

Sex and sex roles were on the minds, for example, of Poughkeepsie Republicans that fine fall day in 1856. Republican women (and the male editors who recorded their views) politicized sex on the signs they carried that day. One group of women demanded Equal Rights and Free Discussion, an ambiguous statement that could have meant either equal rights for women or for blacks. Either way, this sign associated the Republican Party with women who publicly demanded a more egalitarian society. By reporting favorably on women taking a political stand, the newspapers that included this sign in their coverage recommended a public role for women that was more advanced than that advocated by their Democratic opponents. Another banner carried by women read Yes, on the 4th of November. Yes implied a promise that the women would favorably receive marriage proposals from Republican voters, a linkage of sex and politics that editors especially found irresistible. A final banner was displayed by fourteen women from the town of La Grange. Reporters from all four major New York City Republican newspapers quoted the banner, which read:

NO BACHELORS FOR US.

JESSIE,

FREE HEARTS AND FREE HOMES

By declaring no bachelors for us, the women repudiated the unmarried Democratic presidential candidate, James Buchanan. Having rejected the bachelor Buchanan, in the second line of the banner the women celebrated Jessie Benton Frémont, the assertive wife of the Republican candidate, John Frémont. The banner’s third line, however, goes beyond candidates and into the ideological meaning of the early Republican Party. In a campaign during which the Republicans supported Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, and Free Speech, these women endorsed Free Hearts and Free Homes.⁵ Their slogan, alluding as it does to aspects of the American gender system ranging from courtship and romance (Free Hearts) to the power dynamics of families in and out of slavery (Free Homes), raised the question of how antislavery politics would reorder the American household. By focusing narrowly on the legislative and economic elements of antislavery politics, historians have missed an important part of the party’s meaning. In their rallies, speeches, and campaign documents, the Republicans sought changes in the sex roles of men and women. The Republican ideology of free hearts and free homes constituted an important aspect of the broader antislavery political culture.

The ideas of free hearts and free homes, however, remained controversial both within the antislavery community itself and between antislavery political parties and the rival Democratic Party. In an era when family structures and gender roles were in flux, people debated how much change was desirable or whether any alteration was necessary at all. Within the antislavery reform community, people agreed that changes had to be made but questioned the degree of family reform required. Outside the antislavery community, however, the Democratic Party upheld traditional family ideologies and regarded any reforms as threats to the social order.

While the main focus of this study will be the antislavery political parties and their use of gender ideologies to demarcate themselves from their electoral rivals, it is important to note that they did so even as a group of radicals formulated an egalitarian vision of gender relations that far surpassed the antislavery parties’ ideas about the extent of desirable reforms. The broad coalition of antislavery reformers, in fact, often disagreed with each other over a wide range of issues, including gender reform. Historians have labeled the radicals who pressed for the most sweeping social changes the abolitionists while calling the moderates antislavery. While this study focuses upon the development of gender ideologies within the antislavery group, the abolitionists established the parameters of the debate on most topics. Abolitionists sought to expand the Revolutionary generation’s egalitarian ideal to include African Americans, and they campaigned for an immediate end to slavery because it was sinful and a direct affront to God. Abolitionists also usually dismissed politics, hoping instead to persuade individuals to voluntarily give up slavery as a means to religious and personal redemption. Because abolitionists saw the renunciation of slavery as a voluntary personal act to be undertaken for one’s own salvation, no financial compensation would be given to slaveholders (though some might be given to former slaves). In contrast, antislavery people sought only to halt slavery’s growth in the hopes that it would then die out gradually. They formed the political parties that this work examines in order to change government policy on slavery; their members were also generally less receptive to claims of universal racial equality, and they often entertained plans for compensating slaveholders or settling freed blacks in colonies outside the United States.⁶ Hardly a united coalition, the opponents of slavery often seemed to spend as much time debating with each other about the proper course of the movement as they did fighting slavery.

The split between abolitionists and antislavery moderates carried over to differences of opinion about gender reform. Many abolitionists supported a radical women’s rights position, while antislavery politicians endorsed more limited reforms. During the 1830s, the first decade of organized white abolitionist activity aimed at the South, abolitionist women began to occupy prominent places in the movement. Women circulated petitions, delivered speeches, organized women’s antislavery societies, and wrote books and pamphlets. In 1840 many abolitionists, led by William L. Garrison, wanted to elect Abby Kelley to a seat on the Business Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in recognition for her tireless fund-raising and speaking efforts and also to illustrate their willingness to trust women with leadership positions. Not all abolitionists, however, were ready to take this step, and Kelley’s nomination splintered the convention and the movement. Abolitionists unhappy with Kelley’s nomination and subsequent election left the AAS and formed a rival, and more conservative, group, the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society.⁷

After the 1840 split, Garrisonian abolitionists continued their loud condemnations of patriarchy, whether found in northern households or on southern plantations. For abolitionists such as Henry Clarke Wright, Sarah Grimké, Stephen Pearl Andrews, George Luther Stearns, James Caleb Jackson, and a host of female abolitionists who also worked for the women’s rights movement, American families needed drastic reform. In their eyes, men in the North and the South enjoyed far too much power and had proven themselves unable to withstand the temptation to wield it. Since the legal system denied wives control over their incomes, their property, and even their bodies, husbands too often robbed them of their wages or inheritances. Worse still, husbands could beat or rape their wives with virtual impunity. In the South, this situation was compounded by a master’s control over not only his female relatives but also the people he owned. Often attacking slavery as the Patriarchal Institution, abolitionists condemned the South’s forced labor system for its familial and sexual aspects as much as for its economic and religious ramifications. Abolitionists argued that wherever absolute power was held, men were sure to abuse their privileged status over their dependents.⁸ As Henry Wright phrased it, "Husbands! Husbands! the guilt is mainly yours; and the damnation is just.⁹ One obvious solution was to abolish slavery; other solutions were persuading northern men to exercise greater sexual restraint and empowering women to make decisions about everything from household finances to the frequency and timing of sexual relations. Northern households would function as God wished only if women gained authority within the home and if, as Stephen Pearl Andrews wrote, the male sex drive crouch[ed] like the whipped spaniels at the feet of divine love."¹⁰

Abolitionists failed to achieve the more radical parts of their sex reform agenda, but they succeeded in publicizing their concerns through speaking engagements, books, and the constantly overlapping attendance of abolitionists and women’s rights activists at one another’s conventions.¹¹ By calling people’s attention to gender issues and the question of sexual rights, they instigated public debates on these topics. As a result, abolitionist attacks on patriarchy became one of the intellectual parameters within which the more moderate antislavery parties created their own gender ideologies in the years after 1840. Unable to ignore either the debates themselves or the spirited positions enunciated by their radical associates, the antislavery parties confronted issues such as the right of women to public influence, the rights of women in a new economy and in the workplace, and most controversial of all, the right of wives to deny their husbands sexual access.

While the antislavery reform community held different opinions about the extent to which American gender roles needed to be altered, another large rift over gender occurred between the antislavery parties and the Democratic Party. The Democrats, who after 1848 usually stood united in their support of white supremacy and slavery (though not always slavery’s western expansion), also agreed on the necessity of maintaining the status quo in gender roles. Viewed broadly, Democrats upheld a traditional, patriarchal vision of masculine rights and feminine submission. Appealing to the experiences of generations of European and American subsistence farmers according to which men ruled their self-contained households by means of their rights to property, the vote, and public speech, the Democratic Party in the North and in the South called for the continuation of traditional structures and alarmed voters about the consequences of change. Democratic fears about social change resonated with many people because northern family structures were in a state of flux. With the spread of canals and railroads and the growth of urban areas, many antebellum northerners lived in an economic world that bore little relation to the subsistence farms of their parents (or of their own youth). Tied to national and international markets and caught up in a cash economy, they found that familial strategies and gender ideologies were evolving with their changing economic circumstances. For commercial farmers and urban professionals, what historians call the new middle class, the large families and patriarchal control that exemplified subsistence farm families made little economic or social sense.¹² With antislavery politicians endorsing this social trend, Democrats steadfastly held to the patriarchal subsistence farm life that was falling, very slowly, by the wayside. In short, Democrats and Republicans positioned themselves within a larger cultural debate then being waged over the wisdom of the changes their constituents were making (or resisting) in their own family practices and gender roles. By the 1850s, then, three groups had taken positions on the gender roles with which northerners were experimenting. Democrats occupied the conservative position, antislavery parties sought some degree of reform, and radical abolitionists called for changes that would put men and women on much more equal footings.

By investigating a variety of means by which political parties presented their gender ideology to the public, this work demonstrates the distinctive nature of the parties’ positions on family and gender and argues for their significance in how people formed their partisan loyalties. In doing so, this book charts the evolution of antislavery gender thought from the formation of the Liberty Party in 1840 to the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Republican success in articulating a gender ideology that resonated with northern men and women helps to explain Lincoln’s victory over the Democrats. The cultural divide between those northern ideals and those endorsed by southern audiences, as well as the virulent attacks some Republicans made against the family and sexual practices on slave plantations, also helps make the subsequent secession of the southern states and the coming of the Civil War more understandable. The election of Lincoln in 1860 constituted a victory for a new set of gender ideologies, and it signaled a transfer of power from one constituency’s worldview to another’s. For antislavery activists, it was an exhilarating prospect, but for the South, it was one more reason to regard adherence to the United States as a threat to their conservative society.

Contested Ground in the Debate over Patriarchy

Within the broad ideological range created by abolitionists, antislavery parties, and Democrats, six specific issues consistently emerge as points of contention. These issues sprang from people’s daily lives. Two specifically concerned the places women should occupy in society. First, northerners debated what roles women should play in the new wage labor force and in the capitalist marketplace. Second, they asked whether women should be allowed to have public roles in society that might grant them political power, such as the right to speak in public to men and women, the right to publish their thoughts on political topics, and the right to petition Congress. Two other controversial issues related to the nature of marriage. Antebellum northerners questioned whether the best foundation for a successful marriage lay in romantic love or in a union of economic equals. Once married, spouses confronted a fourth issue that divided people and the political parties they formed: How many children should a couple have and, especially, should a wife be able to limit her husband’s sexual access to her body? The sexual behavior and rights of husbands introduced a fifth issue of social and political debate. In the North, people often discussed the ideal traits a man should possess, but consensus proved elusive. As men increasingly worked for others instead of enjoying the privileges and pitfalls of independent life as masters of their own farms or small workshops, writers began to valorize men who exercised self-control rather than the outright control of others. A self-disciplined wage earner could follow orders in the workplace and resist the daily temptations that he faced as a consumer in the marketplace. The final issue, the emancipation of America’s slaves, bore little obvious relationship to the ongoing redefinition of gender roles, but antislavery advocates came to perceive slavery and its abolition as filled with implications for families and the roles that men and women played in them.

Examined individually, each of these issues demonstrates the close links that existed among the economic and social realities of American lives, the formation of gender ideologies, and the adoption of those ideologies by rival political parties. The dispute over what roles women should play in the wage labor economy and the marketplace illustrates how social and economic changes entered the nation’s political life. Women’s wage work and their roles in a consumer society became more important in the aftermath of a process now known as the market revolution. Starting in small pockets of the northeast in the late 1700s but gaining momentum with the building of canals and railroads during the Jacksonian era, the market revolution transformed much of the northern economy from subsistence family farming and barter to a cash economy that featured the buying and selling of commodities and labor on the open market.¹³ The growth of this cash economy profoundly affected women’s lives.

Subsistence agriculture had meant that parental control over their daughters’ and sons’ unpaid labor was critical to survival. With cash in short supply and the option of hiring workers consequently out of the question, a family with many children could plant more acres of crops and do more domestic labor than one with fewer children. In a country such as the United States, where land was still relatively cheap, children represented economic assets until the day they managed to accumulate enough resources to marry and establish their own households. While options for gaining a living independent of one’s family remained restricted for sons, choices were arguably worse for farm daughters, whose ability to earn cash and independence was very sharply limited. Social tradition held a wife subordinate to her spouse’s authority, and a daughter could anticipate only a move from the rule of her father to the rule of her husband.¹⁴ While it would be inaccurate to imply that these households were always devoid of affective ties or even powerful women, the household of the subsistence economy was held together by the patriarchal control of resources.

Such paternal control over adult daughters weakened in the aftermath of the market revolution. While we should remember Jonathan Prude’s warning that we do not know nearly enough about how gender roles changed as rural households confronted currents of economic change, we know that the economic changes caused a general slippage in patriarchal strength.¹⁵ As the economy changed, women who stayed on farms that sold produce at markets, known as commercial farms, gained more authority in their households. Historian Joan Jensen concludes that women on commercial farms around Philadelphia controlled the production and marketing of butter during the first half of the nineteenth century, thus generating substantial cash incomes for their families. In addition, because women seldom returned from market with cash; rather they would bring back commodities, the women’s economic activities did not necessarily perpetuate male control of the family’s economic resources. The result, Jensen notes, was the slow expansion of women into public roles such as the Quaker ministry, teaching, and reform activity (including antislavery). In the era of commercial farming, the women outside Philadelphia, Jensen argues, loosened the bonds of the traditional rural family in small but significant ways; it was reduced in size, less subject to male control, and modified by female experimentation and productivity.¹⁶ In other areas where farm women earned a cash income through cottage industry, they influenced how their earnings were spent; often they purchased manufactured textiles, a strategy that relieved them of the tedious process of making homespun.¹⁷ For women who remained in commercialized farm households, the market economy meant entrance into the public world of the marketplace both as producers and as consumers.

Women who left farms experienced even more radical changes. The market economy enabled many women to leave because