Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans

Historian Karen Lystra explores a fascinating and almost wholly overlooked subject in her new book: the inner lives of everyday Americans. Love and the Working Class: The Inner Worlds of Nineteenth Century Americans is in some ways a sequel, albeit a meaty one. Thirty-five years ago, she published Searching the Heart: Men, Women, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth Century America (1989), an account that challenged ideas of “Victorian” prudery with robust evidence that bourgeois Americans expressed passion and enjoyed marital sex. Her newest book, much like the former, depends almost entirely on letters that everyday people sent each other. The marvel of Love and the Working Class is that Lystra succeeded in locating letters among a far less literate subset of Americans, who did not have the educational advantages of the middle class. From the thousands of letters she read, Lystra identifies key differences in working-class expressions of love, marriage, and family connection. The result is a densely researched account of how working-class Americans in the nineteenth century approached marriage, expressed affection, and valued community.In Love and the Working Class, Lystra challenges the standard narrative about the ascent of romantic love in nineteenth-century American marital expectations. Among the working class she instead finds a persistent pragmatism that produced what she calls “nonromantic” courtship and marriage; an emphasis on “tribal intimacy,” with working-class people expressing affection for their (usually homogeneous) hometown peer group and family members, rather than for a special someone; and a reliance on popular poetry in lieu of original expressions of sentiment or desire. Lystra provides evidence of young men who ask a sibling or friend to “give my love to all the girls,” rather than to any girl in particular. Finding a mate, according to Lystra, was a process of elimination from the candidates available in the local community, not a love quest. Working-class people, Lystra argues, recognized marriage as a pathway to family-making and economic survival. Marriages faltered not when love died but when husbands failed to provide or wives neglected their household responsibilities.These arguments challenge long-standing historical truisms about the ascent of romantic ideals in the young nation, and they also recast the inner lives of nineteenth-century Americans. Lystra compiles data from the vast trove of letters she collected over decades of research to argue that “working-class Americans in nonromantic relationships did not invest sex with the meanings of selfhood or individual authenticity,” a direct challenge to historians (myself included) who have previously identified this century as a moment when sexuality became a key aspect of American ideas of the self. That may have been true among middle-class people, Lystra explains, but working-class people almost never wrote about sex as “spiritual communion” or waxed poetic about its pleasures. She cites examples of sexual teasing among working-class partners but suggests that a general lack of privacy—and fear of embarrassment—dampened working-class people’s expression of passion in their correspondence. Nonliterate people hired scribes to write their letters for them, and families tended to pass around any communications that came into their homes, making privacy scarce. Here Lystra suggests that a practical concern about public exposure was also a reflection of working-class people’s sense of self: Working-class people omitted romantic details from their letters not only because they feared teasing or shaming but also because they did not view sexuality as key to their inner lives or associate romance with courtship or love.Lystra spent decades researching this book, traveling to archives throughout the United States and making excellent use of the growing body of digitized source material. She provides a primer in how to decipher nonstandard spelling and grammar, highlighting the interplay of oral and written language in working-class people’s letters. This expertise enabled her to locate subtleties in colloquial expressions, the commonality of certain simple poetic phrases (of the “roses are red / violets are blue” variety), and patterns in working-class people’s understanding of their place in the world.Lystra defines the scope of “love” with an implicit focus on heterosexual couples. She covers nonromantic courtship and love, affection among family members, and the importance of hometown communities. But what of same-sex or queer desires? Given the wealth of information we have learned over the last thirty years about the visibility, expressiveness, and importance of queer desires for nineteenth-century Americans, the omission deserved an explanation. Otherwise, the oversight becomes another unfortunate example of simply ignoring the reality that many people felt their deepest passions not for a different-sex spouse but for a same-sex friend or lover. I wondered in particular about how Lystra might interpret the evidence from Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality (2001), which featured many mixed-class couples with older, middle-class men and their younger, working-class lovers, or the letters exchanged between two Black women in the mid-nineteenth century, beautifully annotated in Farah Jasmine Griffin’s Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854–1868 (1999). Primus came from a middle-class family and became an educator, but Brown was working class and likely a self-taught writer. I look forward to other studies that might bring these research discoveries into conversation with one another, providing an even richer history of working-class love and intimacy in the nineteenth century.This book makes a tremendous contribution to what we know about how nineteenth-century working-class Americans thought about sex, marriage, family, and community. Lystra conducted a truly monumental amount of research to produce this clearly written, often touching book about the inner lives of working-class Americans, and her contribution is original and important.