Domestic revolution and cultural formation in nineteenth-century ontario, canada

Abstract

Postwar consensus theory ensured that a middle-class cultural order was fated in North America. Its abandonment encouraged alternative perspectives, including close historical studies of the rise of the urban middle class family through the mid-nineteenth century. These studies located the core of middle-class formation in a virtual domestic revolution, among other changes. A review of recent, diverse evidence, focused on nineteenth-century Ontario, suggests alternatively that in some places the roots of the twentieth-century hegemony of middle-class family culture are more widespread, and are more deeply buried in the last century than current theory and research allows.