The feminization of American culture

by Douglas, Ann

This is one of those rare books that let us see with a fresh and startling clarity the underlying causes, meaning, and influence through time of profound a cultural phenomenon. In it, a brilliant young scholar traces the roots of our modern consumer culture to the sentimental society of Victorian America. With originality and sympathetic wit, Ann Douglas explores the alliance, beginning in 1820, of two disenfranchised groups: the women of the middle class and the liberal Protestant clergy, both increasingly relegated to the edges of society (to the parlor, to the Sunday School, to the libraries) by the prevailing entrepreneurial forces. Ann Douglas shows us the ladies and the ministers cultivating a realm of "influence," becoming the cultural custodians, taking control of the schools, preaching a reverence for the very qualities that society imposed upon them: timidity, piety, childish naivete, a disdain for the competitive forces in the larger world. She gives us the missing social hi