Provincial Women in Transition

Abstract

Catherine Kelly's book, In New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in Nineteenth Century, contributes to broadening definitions of American women's history. Meticulously researched, Kelly focuses upon lived experiences of during early nineteenth century. Referencing a wide variety of diaries, published writings, and letters, Kelly has re-drawn boundaries of nineteenth-century notions of family, womanhood, friendship, and respectability for New England women who lived outside of urban landscape. As New Englanders struggled to make sense of an ever-changing world, provincial women searched for ways to accept and reject social and economic transition brought about by capitalist transformation of countryside. What becomes evident through Kelly's work is that nineteenth-century rural women negotiated new relationships and life styles based upon transition from a disappearing household economy to a market-oriented society. It is this transition according to Kelly, that creates a middle class distinct from its urban counterpart. As women in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont remained committed to virtue of early republican simplicity, they created and upheld an altered set of values appropriate for a capitalist market society, which eventually developed into a provincial bourgeoisie. Kelly begins her exploration into changing lives of nineteenth-century provincial women by examining affects of a market economy upon women's work. Acknowledging dependency accompanied by narrowing of separate spheres, rural women of New England found themselves confined to domestic and or piece work within home. Rural women realized that their future wealth depended not upon themselves, but as Kelly argues: the productive yeoman's wife found that her fortunes depended on those of her male kin in general and her husband in particular (p. 46). In addition to women's dependency, their domestic work was also affected by a shift to a market economy. Kelly uses task of sewing as a symbol for