Absent husbands, single wives: success, domesticity, and seminuclear families in the nineteenth-century Great Lakes world

The industrial and transportation revolutions of nineteenth-century America separated work from home (at least for the growing middle class) and intensified the development of masculine and feminine spheres devoted to success and domesticity, respectively. This development tended to reduce the husband's traditional patriarchal roles to that of provider only, while leaving the wife and mother with enhanced authority over household management and child rearing, a development with consequences for feminism. This article examines two extreme cases of separation of work from home: absent husbands, respected professional men, who left their wives alone for months or years and, while they provided financial support, surrendered all household authority to "single" wives.