A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum New England

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1995 by Mary Young

Since New Englanders in her sample moved frequently among jobs and from country to city and back, since poor farmers and craftsmen owned property and worked for themselves, ordinary definitions of class fail to characterize their lives. Hansen defines working people as those who had to struggle to make a living with little property and without a college education. Her sample contains teachers, ministers, farm wives, textile workers, sailors, domestic servants, day laborers, clerks, milliners, many who moved from job to job, and a few who in later life became modestly wealthy. She finds them heavily involved in visiting, offering hospitality, sharing work, caring for the sick and those in childbirth, attending churches and temperance and antislavery lectures, and offering terse, direct opinions the prescriptive literature would not have permitted them to have. Ignoring the doctrinal teachings of their ministers, they freely attended several churches in sequence, sometimes two on a single Sunday, looking for a minister who offered good theater with congenial opinions. One woman dismissed the lyceum lecture of a prominent and highly touted Congregational minister on the grounds that though he spoke highly of women, he went on and on about spheres, and all that. Men and women among her working people "rarely aspired to middle class standards, and repeatedly rejected them in practice" (p.24).

The doctrine of separate spheres, probably never more than a doctrine even in middle class circles, fails entirely to capture the experience of these men and women. To replace the dichotomy of private and public, Hansen suggests a trichotomy, with the category of the "social" mediating between public and private, linking households with one another and people with institutions. In the social sphere, the sexes related with greater mutuality and equality than prevailed in either public or private, and in their social "work" women found multiple opportunities for influence, self-assertion, and self-expression.

Great numbers of visitors crowded their small houses, where women more often than men played host. Whether in predominantly male-centered activities like barn-raisings, primarily female activities like assisting at births, quilting parties, visiting the families who had suffered a death or celebrated a new baby, men and women together created for themselves a "welfare system without the state." Even where women predominated, as in caring for sick people outside their own households, or quilting, men also routinely participated as time and circumstance permitted. Mutuality and reciprocity were the informal rules of this system of exchange, which overlapped the market at many places. Visiting often meant shared labor, at piecework or laundry, for example; work and leisure were not separate and task orientation prevailed. Before the speedups of the 1840s, even textile workers read to one another, chatted, and entertained visitors on the shop floor. One reason for the relative unpopularity of domestic labor was that it tended to isolate the servant from her usual social network.

Hansen derives inspiration for her categories and characterizations of the social sphere from present-day sociologists and anthropologists. She seems curiously ambiguous with respect to whether practices like labor-sharing may continue in the late twentieth century, with its allegedly pervasive market and dichotomous treatment of work and leisure. Surely, among those who, like her antebellum working people, cannot afford to pay other people for minding their children, painting their living rooms, or fixing their cars, labor exchange is alive and well.

Just as social work linked households in a system of mutual interdependence, so it linked individuals with public institutions. Hansen's people were as likely to convert and endeavor to sustain themselves in grace with a friend or friends, as in a revival meeting. Social work converted friends not only to church membership, but also to participation in temperance activity and attendance and occasional affiliation with antislavery societies. Churches served as social centers, and felt the pressure of converts to temperance and antislavery to serve as centers of propaganda and political agitation as well. Few but the African-American and "left-wing" Quaker establishments succumbed to the pressure. Hansen suggests that much of the debate over slavery fundamentally concerned the question of proper boundaries between private conviction and social and political practice.

A more fully developed biography might have improved this rather rigorously sociological intersection between society, biography, and history. Like any good revisionist, Hansen sometimes exaggerates the simplicity and unanimity of the voices to whom she replies. But a trichotomy beats a dichotomy any time, and both her arguments and her examples instruct and entertain the careful reader.

Mary Young University of Rochester