4.6 Market Revolution: Society and Culture

New Social Classes Emerge

The Market Revolution created a distinct middle class of merchants, factory owners, and professionals, along with a growing working class of wage laborers. Cities grew rapidly, but urban conditions were often crowded and unsanitary. Cult of domesticity ideals cast middle-class women as guardians of home and morality, while working-class women, like the Lowell Mill girls, entered factory labor.

Family and Gender Roles Shift

As production moved from household to factory, separate spheres ideology emerged: men worked in the public economic sphere, women managed the private domestic sphere. This reinforced middle-class gender norms even as many women and children worked in mills. Reformers like those in the Second Great Awakening used religious revivalism to address social change, inspiring temperance, abolition, and education movements.

Reform Movements and Culture

Market growth spurred reform efforts: utopian communities (e.g., Oneida, New Harmony) experimented with alternative social/economic structures; temperance targeted alcohol abuse linked to industrial life; and calls for public education aimed to create informed citizens and workers. These reforms reflected optimism that society could be perfected, rooted in Second Great Awakening revivalism.

Key terms

Separate spheres

Ideology dividing men's public economic roles from women's private domestic roles during the Market Revolution.

Cult of domesticity

Belief that middle-class women should focus on home, family, and moral virtue rather than paid work.

Lowell Mill girls

Young, unmarried women who worked in New England textile factories, symbolizing new female labor roles.

Second Great Awakening

Religious revival movement emphasizing personal salvation and moral reform, inspiring temperance, abolition, and education movements.

Utopian communities

Experimental societies (e.g., Oneida, New Harmony) testing alternative social and economic structures in response to industrial change.

Try an AP-style question

The "cult of domesticity" held that middle-class women should…

1. focus on home and moral influence
2. work in factories full time
3. run for political office
4. manage family businesses