Verified answer

As quoted from the first link, under "A New Social Order" --

"A distinctive middle class emerged:

- The market revolution ended the ‘natural’ fixed social order. The market revolution encouraged social climbing. The number of 'middling sorts' grew rapidly. They changed their attitudes and emphasized sobriety and hard work.

- Religion helped shape the new attitudes. The Second Great Awakening stressed personal faith. Preachers such as Charles G. Finney urged businessmen to convert, and emphasized self-discipline and individualism.

- Families changed under the weight of the market revolution. As production moved out of the household, the family no longer combined work and personal life.

- The wife could now concentrate on domestic tasks, defined as something other than 'work.' Middle-class women were to manage their homes and provide a safe haven for their husbands. Attitudes about appropriate male and female roles and qualities hardened.

- Men were seen as steady, industrious, and responsible; women as nurturing, gentle, and moral. The popularity of housekeeping guides underscored the radical changes occurring in middle-class families.

- Middle-class couples limited their family size through birth control, abstinence, and abortion. Sexuality was redefined as an impulse that women needed to help men learn how to suppress.

New views of motherhood emerged as women were seen as primarily responsible for training their children in self-discipline.

- Women formed networks and read advice magazines to help them in these tasks.

- Mothers made contacts that would contribute to their children’s later development.

- Children also prolonged their education and professional training.

- The reality was that a man’s success was very much the result of his family’s efforts.

- Sentimentalism began as a reaction against individualistic competitiveness. It turned into a rigid code of etiquette, a form of recognizably middle class social behavior enforced by women.

- Transcendental philosophy, as articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, helped middle-class men in particular reconcile individualism and responsibility."

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if you need additional information:

http://www.shmoop.com/market-revolution/

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