THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY, SOUTHERN STYLE

Within domestic spaces, women tested their future spouses' religious commitments, strove to build marriages based on Biblical ideals, raised children to receive the faith, and guided loved ones through death from this world to the next. In the main, he adheres to the revealed wisdom about differences between Northern and Southern evangelicalism, observing, for instance, that "in stark contrast to northern evangelicalism's reform ethos, southern evangelicalism's skittish attitude toward nearly every reform movement confirmed its alignment with the South's dominant social order" (p. 15).