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Catherine E. Kelly, In the New England Fashion: Reshaping Women's Lives in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. ix + 258 pp. $39.95 cloth.

In the opening pages of her clearly written and nuanced book on the emergence of the provincial middle classes, Catherine Kelly notes that nineteenth-century Americans held two seemingly different visions of the New England town. While some lauded the New England town as a source of order and stability, others condemned it as stagnant and parochial. What the casual observer misses, according to Kelly, is that these visions rested on a shared belief that the New England town had remained untouched by market culture, somehow avoiding the changes wrought by capitalism. Historians have devoted considerable attention to the processes that transformed rural New England in the nineteenth century, stressing the transformative effects of the “market revolution” on economic and social relations. Despite living in the midst of these enormous changes, Kelly's observers focused primarily on continuity—seeing in the New England town the persistence of preindustrial values of cleanliness, social harmony, and stability. Rather than dismissing these visions as mere “pastoral fantasy,” Kelly interprets them as expressions of profound anxiety, generated by an emerging provincial middle class in the throes of negotiating the transition from a household economy to a commercialized one. Ultimately, however, their expressions of resistance would prove pivotal in the spread of bourgeois culture and in the perpetuation of capitalist social relations.