A SEXUAL IDEOLOGY with profoundly antifeminist implications developed in the northern United States during the forty years after 1830. This middle class ideal of sentimental womanhood, defining women as spiritual, emotional, and dependent, has received less attention than the ideology of the small minority of feminists and reformers who rejected a passive stereotype of women in their search for autonomy. Yet the antifeminist system of belief dominated the perception of women in the nineteenth century. It provided women with supreme domestic powers through religious influence and the education of children, though it exacted a price of powerlessness beyond these spheres. How was it that this sentimental ideal had such pervasive influence? The most common answer is that it was the result of economic change.