UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI Date:___________________ I, _________________________________________________________, hereby submit this work as part of the requirements for the degree of: in: It is entitled: This work and its defense approved by: Chair: _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ _______________________________ “Making Middle-Class Marriage Modern in Kentucky, 1830 to 1900” A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY In the Department of History of the College of Arts and Sciences 8 September 2006 by Kathleen Leonard Bayes M.A. (History), University of Cincinnati, 1998 M.A. (Women’s Studies), University of Cincinnati, 1996 B.A., York University, Toronto, Canada, 1982 Committee Chair: Wayne K. Durrill Abstract This study examines changes that Kentucky’s white middle class made to marital ideals in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that this developing class refined an earlier ideal of companionate marriage to better suit their economic, social, and cultural circumstances in an urban environment. This reevaluation of companionate marriage corresponded with Kentucky’s escalating entry into a national market economy and the state’s most rapid period of urbanization. As it became increasingly unlikely that young men born to Kentucky’s white landed settler families would inherit either land or enslaved labor, they began to rely on advanced education in order to earn a livelihood in towns and cities. Because lack of land and labor caused a delay in their ability to marry, the members of Kentucky’s middle class focused attention on romantic passion rather a balance of reasoned affection and wealth in land when they formulated their urban marital ideal. They encountered several obstacles in the process of redefining marriage. Kentucky’s middle class was a small urban ship on a vast rural sea. A majority of Kentucky’s population, both white and black, continued to define marriage in a way that suited life in a family farm economy. In addition, white middle-class men faced challenges to their ownership of enslaved people, property and wealth because educated white women in urban centers began to demand more control of family finances and people in Kentucky, bolstered by an increased agitation for abolition, challenged the institution of slavery. In response, the members of Kentucky’s middle class attempted to establish cultural hegemony over the marital ideals and practices of Kentucky’s large rural population. They also began to culturally buttress marriage as an institution in which white men acted as legal, social and economic heads of households. Although this dissertation is a study of the contesting marriage beliefs and practices between urban and rural people of Kentucky, it raises questions for further research about heightened romantic ideals of marriage that historians have found among an urbanizing, northern white middle class in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Acknowledgements I am indebted to my advisor, Wayne Durrill, for his timely suggestions as I wrote my dissertation, for graciously reading and editing many versions of this work, and his suggestion that I look at Civil War Pension files for Kentucky Union veterans and their wives to discover the marital beliefs and practices of rural people in Kentucky. Most of these people left no written records but stories they told pension officers bear witness to their extraordinary lives. I thank Maura O’Connor whose enthusiastic approach to history made graduate school worthy of very hard work that brought great joy. Barbara Ramusack was responsible for my entry into the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Cincinnati and for my original interest in comparative women’s history. Both Maura O’Connor and Barbara Ramusack have followed my progress through two graduate degrees and a doctorate with unwavering encouragement and support. Nancy Theriot, Chairperson of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Louisville, graciously agreed to be an outside reader and to serve on my dissertation committee. The process of writing was rather prolonged and I thank her for her patience. My family, Peter and Matthew, have lived with and shared the pleasure (and the pain) of dissertating. Thank you both! When the writing bogged down you kept me going. This work is because of and in honor of my grandmother, Belle, and my mother, Anne. Table of Contents Dissertation Abstract Acknowledgements Introduction 2 Chapter 1: Postponing Marriage to Accumulate Wealth: A Dilemma for Kentucky’s Emerging White Middle Class, 1830 to 1860 14 Chapter 2: “Never marry for money!” From Reasoned Affection to Romantic Passion, 1830 to 1900 45 Chapter 3: Money Matters: Contesting Visions, 1830 to 1900 79 Chapter 4: An Enduring Rural Vision: Marriage as a Gendered Labor Bargain, 1830 to 1900 101 Chapter 5: Marrying Martha Off: Romantic “Ecstacys” and Economic Realities in Rural Kentucky, 1850 to 1900 130 Chapter 6: “Love the Angel Broken Upon the Wheel of Necessity:” Middle-Class Public Discourse Polices Modern Marriage, 1840 to 1900 164 Conclusion 197 Bibliography: 203 1 Introduction In her portrayal of courtship and marriage in the late eighteenth century, the English novelist, Jane Austen, observed how an English gentry and developing middle class began to eschew earlier aristocratic notions of what ought to motivate a good marriage. While Austen’s most admirable characters continued to evaluate a man’s marital worth on the basis of his annual income, respectable marriages, she determined, ought to be undertaken for “high wrought love” rather than forged as “preservatives from want.” 1 It is Austen’s high wrought notion that we imagine when we think about marriage as a private contract made between two individuals on the basis of subjective feelings of love. In the 1970s and 1980s scholars researching the history of western marriage and family found evidence suggesting that ideals for the basis of marriage had indeed changed, and that a romantic vision of marriage had a determinate history. Looking at marriage and family formation in Western Europe, scholars noted that sometime between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries the notion of what ought to motivate marriage began to shift as capitalism and market relations replaced agricultural economies. At the same time, they argue, marriage shifted from a traditional union based on economic and political alliances between families for livelihood and labor to modern and companionate unions based on individual choice for love. 2 As one historian writes, 1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (New York: Modern Library, 2000, originally published 1813), 91; Jane Austen, Persuasion (New York: Signet Classic, 1989, originally published 1818), 220. 2 For a discussion of the research and findings of historians of European family and marriage that includes some work by historians on the American family see Tamara K. Hareven, “Family History at the Crossroads,” Journal of Family History Volume 12, 2 “a climate of opinion in which marriage was assumed to result from social and material considerations changed to one in which subjective and emotional considerations were, if not central, at least acknowledged to play a role.”3 Changes in nuptial laws or sexuality rather than shifts in the meaning of marriage have generated attention among historians examining cultural changes in the United States. What history is available for American marital beliefs suggests that white, English speaking Americans also embraced a companionate marriage model. Several scholars argue that Europeans brought these ideals with them when they landed on America’s Atlantic shores in the seventeenth century. Richard Godbeer suggests, for example, that the Puritans celebrated sexual passion and ardent love between marital partners, providing these intimacies remained within the confines of religiously sanctioned marriage.4 John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman similarly argue that men and women migrating from Europe to the English Atlantic colonies brought ideals of marital love and celebrated its sexual expression. By the end of the eighteenth century, they suggest, Americans had accepted Enlightenment ideals, and expressed their expectations for individual choice, more equality or companionship between husbands and wives, and Numbers 1-3 (1987): ix-xxiii. For a more recent discussion of the historiography generated by historians of Western Europe about the rise of sentiment in family and marriage see Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Settlement in Neuchatel, 1550-1800 (Ithica: Cornell University Press), 1992. 3 Margaret Darrow, “Popular Concepts of Marital Choice in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of Social History (Winter 1985): 261-272. 4 Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 2002. 3 mutual romantic attraction as precursors for marriage. 5 Herman Lantz found ideas of love in companionate marriage prevalent in colonial newspapers, magazines, novels and marriage manuals as early as 1741.6 Nancy Cott has argued that, since the Revolutionary Era, Americans have viewed marriage as “a voluntary union based on consent” and that “Americans were very much committed to marriage founded on love.”7 Anya Jabour