ABSTRACT
In the early-nineteenth-century United States there was a marked DIVISION OF LABOR within MIDDLE-CLASS households: Women’s sphere or special area was the domestic space, the home and children, while men’s sphere was the outside world. At least among the Northeastern urban middle class the idea that men went “out” to work and that “woman’s place was in the home” was dominant. In an unspoken bargain a woman’s status rose in tandem with her husband’s wealth and public prominence. It could also fall with changes in fortune or the death of her partner.
