In the first half of the nineteenth century, rural New England society underwent a radical transformation as the traditional household economy gave way to an encroaching market culture. Drawing on a wide array of diaries, letters, and published writings by women in this society, Catherine E. Kelly describes women's attempts to make sense of the changes in their world by elaborating values connected to rural life.

In her hands, the narratives reveal the dramatic ways female lives were reshaped during the antebellum period and the women's own contributions to those developments. Equally important, she demonstrates how these writings afford a fuller understanding of the capitalist transformation of the countryside and the origins of the Northern middle class.