The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930

This book explores the connections between gender and public life and the role of government in shaping those connections. Baker examines the public and private lives of men and women in New York State to provide a richly detailed account of the ways in which gender, politics, and government have shaped one anothers' future. She delineates widely held beliefs about religion, change, and work in the late nineteenth century and shows how men and women applied these ideas to politics in different ways. The increasing importance of state government in rural life helped recast men's and women's political ideas and behavior. Baker's close reading of the writings of rural men and women and the work of local and state government provides new insights into the achievement of the suffrage movement, the fate of the nineteenth-century ideal of domesticity, the decline of localism, and the importance of government to people's political expectations and daily lives.