Reseña de Choise

This book treats changes in upper-class education in the 19th-century northeastern US in response to industrialization and the changing nature of religion in society. As mainstream Protestantism relaxed previously dour convictions regarding sinfulness and discipline, newer views held that children were not born sinful, but were instead malleable beings. Concurrently, industrialization reshaped families by putting men to work outside the home, resulting in mothers becoming solely responsible for raising children just as the new economy began to provide bountiful consumer goods. Thus, Cook (Rutgers Univ., Camden) argues that rather than continuing to instruct children according to stern religious values to ensure their moral education, this period emphasized refined taste--a sense of which goods were and were not good--as the new basis of morality and defense of the status quo. Here, however, the author's claim ignores the fact that all knowledge is conditional. This volume might have offered more to a social scientific understanding of the topic had it been more modest in its claims and not replaced historical narrative with sociological jargon and too much exposition. In sum, this is a book for specialists only. Summing Up: Recommended. With reservations. Graduate students and faculty. --Douglas W Steeples, emeritus, Independent Scholar