Evangelicals and 'Domestic Felicity' in the Non-Elite South

The present examination suggests that the forces that shaped non-elite southern families did so independently of planter hegemony, and that adherence to faith led to middle-class family styles before industrial forces began to work in the rural South. Through the use of tract societies, Bible societies, newspapers, Sunday Schools, and other tools of the publishing market, evangelical sources served as a channel for middle-class ideas about families and social relations; sources not implicated in the maintenance of patriarchal power. Non-elite southern whites who consumed these sources enacted evangelical lessons in the creation of new familial forms