ABSTRACT
In 1820, women’s social identities were al-most entirely derived from their familyroles. The AMERICAN REVOLUTION had done little to alter women’s immediate legal status; for example, the colonial COMMON LAW system of COVERTURE (see Volume 1), under which a husband’s rights subsumed or “covered over” his wife’s, remained intact in state laws in the early nineteenth century. Certain social shifts had already begun in the eighteenth century, however: declining birthrates and mortality rates, rising marriage ages, increased divorce petitions, and a growing sense of the family as primarily an emotional (versus economic) unit. The increasing cultural authority of “Republican mothers” soon combined with the pressures of emergent industrial capitalism to change the structure and experience of American families further. Social forces including industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of consumerism, all exerted additional pressures. By 1900, sexuality and the family were defined by palpably different assumptions than a century beforehand.
