in Connecticut, every farmer and day-laborer, in his family or person, is a consumer not only of the productions of his own farm or handiwork, but also of tea, coffee, sugar, rice, molasses, salt, and spices; of cotton, woolen, and silk goods, ribbons and bonnets; of shoes and hats; of beds and other furniture; of hardware, tinware, and cutlery; of crockery and glassware; of clocks and jewelry; of books, paper and the like. His wants stimulate the mechanic and the merchant; they stimulate him in return, all grow up together; each has a market at home, a market continually enlarging and giving vent to superior wares.

Machine production, Parker continued, facilitated the distribution of comforts and conveniences "more widely than ancient benefactors dared to dream. What were luxuries to our fathers, attainable only by the rich, now find their way to the humble home." Class distinctions were further weakened by the progress of "science, letters, religion," while trade broke down national barriers and fostered peace. "The soldier yields to the merchant.... The hero of force is falling behind the times; the hero of thought, of love, is felt to deserve the homage of mankind."

Elsewhere Parker endorsed the conventional view that women, "far in advance of man" in their "moral feeling, affectional feeling, religious feeling," were the principal source of the refinements in taste and sensibility associated with the democratization of consumption. Arguing for woman suffrage, Parker attributed to the growing influence of women the recognition that "government is political economy—national housekeeping." It was the influence of women, again, that undermined the old authoritarian ideas about children, which embittered family life and encouraged parents, instead of intelligently providing for their needs, to regard them as little monsters of depravity. No woman, Parker declared, "would ever have preached the damnation of babies new-born." Only "celibate priests," ignorant of paternity, could have "invented these ghastly doctrines." Such statements make it clear the domestic values were an essential component of progressive ideology, not just a sentimental gesture to man's "better half," offered in lieu of real equality and respect.

It is true that the domestic ideal could easily be reduced to the sentimental commonplace that "almost every man of extensive influence," in

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