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Making Middle-Class Marriage Modern in Kentucky, 1830-1900

Leonard Bayes, Kathleen E.

Abstract Details

2006, PhD, University of Cincinnati, Arts and Sciences : History.
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 its 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.
Dr. Wayne Durrill (Advisor)
217 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Leonard Bayes, K. E. (2006). Making Middle-Class Marriage Modern in Kentucky, 1830-1900 [Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1160578440

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Leonard Bayes, Kathleen. Making Middle-Class Marriage Modern in Kentucky, 1830-1900. 2006. University of Cincinnati, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1160578440.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Leonard Bayes, Kathleen. "Making Middle-Class Marriage Modern in Kentucky, 1830-1900." Doctoral dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 2006. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1160578440

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)