Market Sentiments: Middle-Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

In this brilliant study, Elizabeth White Nelson challenges a central tenet of 19th-century American history: namely, that men and women lived in separate spheres. Women, supposedly, lived lives focused around hearth and home; men focused on trade and commerce. Market Sentiments turns this theory on its head, arguing that the market and parlor sentimentality were closely intertwined for both men and women.

Scholars have long seen 19th-century sentimentalism as a reaction to the rapid expansio...