Through an analysis of the Quaker lifestyle, this study investigates the origins and fortunes of the domestic family. The author emphasizes the fact that the child-rearing practices demanded by domesticity have a heavy economic cost.

Examining the transplantation of English Quakers to North America from the mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth centuries, Barry Levy looks particularly at the origins and fortunes of the domestic family.

`...We have here an impressive history of the effect of poverty and wealth on migrants to America who happened to be Quakers and a study featuring one of the practices, domesticity. A wonderfully provocative history, it raises as many questions as it answers. Although it reaches beyond its grasp, the fact that it attempts to grasp makes it necessary reading for any historian of Quakerism, the family, and women in Anglo-American culture`. William and Mary Quarterly.