A valuable and compelling portrait of the daily life of Americans during the Victorian era--the fourth volume in the Everyday Life in America series

The contributors cover such seminal topics as modernization, American intellectuals, the origins of the reform movement, the beginnings of the voluntary hospital, literature, and, ultimately, the attack on Victorianism that took place in the early years of the twentieth-century.

Manners & Morals of Victorian America is your gateway to the fashionable world of Victorian America. It draws from the wealth of late 19th and early twentieth etiquette books. With over 400 historic engravings and illustrations, the book details virtually every aspect of Victorian life, including the proper conduct for courtship and wooing, duties of husbands and wives, how to deal with a rejected suitor and even carriage and motoring manners. 7x10, 180 pages.

In 1896, a Norwegian immigrant and mother of eight children named Helga Estby was behind on taxes and the mortgage when she learned that a mysterious sponsor would pay $10,000 to a woman who walked across America. Hoping to win the wager and save her family’s farm, Helga and her teenaged daughter Clara, armed with little more than a compass, red-pepper spray, a revolver, and Clara’s curling iron, set out on foot from Eastern Washington. Their route would pass through 14 states, but they were not allowed to carry more than five dollars each. As they visited Indian reservations, Western boomtowns, remote ranches and local civic leaders, they confronted snowstorms, hunger, thieves and mountain lions with equal aplomb. Their treacherous and inspirational journey to New York challenged contemporary notions of femininity and captured the public imagination. But their trip had such devastating consequences that the Estby women's achievement was blanketed in silence until, nearly a century later, Linda Lawrence Hunt encountered their extraordinary story.

Principal photography by Paul Rocheleau. "Knowledgeable descriptions of the houses & their interiors."--Chicago Tribune.

Anne Rose examines the relationship between American Victorian culture and the Civil War, arguing that Romanticism was at the heart of Victorian culture.

Gives a portrait of typical middle-class life in Victorian American ; examines the material culture of the Victorian era and the growth of Victorianism.

This first collection of essays by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, one of the leading historians of women, is a landmark in women's studies. Focusing on the "disorderly conduct" women and some men used to break away from the Victorian Era's rigid class and sex roles, it examines the dramatic changes in male-female relations, family structure, sex, social custom, and ritual that occurred as colonial America was transformed by rapid industrialization. Included are two now classic essays on gender relations in 19th-century America, "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America" and "The New Woman as Androgyne: Social Order and Gender Crisis, 1870-1936," as well as Smith-Rosenberg's more recent work, on abortion, homosexuality, religious fanatics, and revisionist history. Throughout Disorderly Conduct, Smith-Rosenberg startles and convinces, making us re-evaluate a society we thought we understood, a society whose outward behavior and inner emotional life now take on a new meaning.

In this study of American 19th-century secret orders, the author argues that religious practices and gender roles became increasingly feminized in Victorian America and that secret societies, such as the Freemasons, offered men and boys an alternative, male counterculture.

From the greatest collection of American Victoriana comes a wonderful evocation of the lives of women 100 years ago. Harvey Green culls from letters and diaries, quotes from magazines, and looks at the clothes, samplers, books, appliances, toys, and dolls of the era to provide a rare portrait of daily life in turn-of-the-century America.