Jennifer Featherston

Midterm Examination
HIST 5324
March 8, 2007

Question 1

Barbara Welter’s The Cult of True Womanhood and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s

The Female World of Love and Ritual analyze the legacy of Victorian doctrines that

determined the parameters of “acceptable” female behavior and, consequently, the nature

of women’s influence on society in general. These “separate spheres” of male and

female activity were constructed to ensure that women would shun the corrupt elements

of the outside world to focus on their domestic dominion of morality and motherhood.

However, though early feminist scholarship condemns the conspiratorial oppressiveness

of this ideology, other historians argue that such gender divisions enabled women to

create effective networks for social change and professional growth.

Written shortly after the release of The Feminine Mystique, Barbara Welter’s

analysis of nineteenth-century concept of “true womanhood” caustically recounts the

efforts of popular women’s magazines, etiquette manuals, and educational institutions to

rigidly define women’s “proper” role in American civilization. The “four cardinal

virtues” of this philosophy, “piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity,” were the

tenets “by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors,

and society.” (152) These “innate” female qualities shouldered women with the unique
responsibility of instilling morality in their husbands and children and maintaining a

sense of pleasant order in their households.

This particular dominion over the home, however, was in no way intended to

inspire women to directly extend their moralizing authority into the outside world. In

fact, Welter notes, the prescriptive literature cited in The Cult of True Womanhood

explicitly warned that such subversive ambitions would surely end in disaster. More

specifically, the violation of the “separate spheres” doctrine would condemn these

unfortunate women to a loveless, disreputable existence and cause society as a whole to

disintegrate into “a chaos of disjointed and unsightly elements.” (173)

Linda Kerber’s The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen further expounds

upon this conflict between “acceptable” femininity and public or political participation.

Kerber explains that the egalitarian fervor that flourished in the United States after the

Revolutionary War prompted the patriarchy to devise a strategy that would

simultaneously “satisfy” women’s democratic ambitions and appropriately preserve the

established realms of gender authority. This resulting concept of “Republican

Motherhood” provided women with an acceptable outlet that would steer their political

focus toward their most honorable profession – the rearing of patriotic offspring.

Unlike Welter however, Kerber suggests that the “separate spheres” doctrine was

not entirely oppressive. In fact, The Republican Mother and the Woman Citizen argues

that the moral and patriotic responsibility entrusted to American mothers, though it was

limited to the domestic sphere, actually offered a sense of empowerment. More

specifically, this pre-Victorian concept inspired women to demand better educational

opportunities, a “clearer recognition of women’s economic contributions,” and forged “a

strong political identification with the republic.” (125)

Moreover, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s The Female World of Love and Ritual

further identifies the beneficial aspects of the “separate spheres” doctrine. In contrast to

the restrictive and condescending environment depicted in Welter’s study of popular

Victorian dogma, Smith-Rosenberg employs excerpts from the personal correspondence

and private diaries of bourgeois Victorian women to reveal that this atmosphere allowed

them to create a distinct female culture that provided an exceptional network of

emotional support. Though Smith-Rosenberg’s article focuses on the psychosexual

implications of the structure of Victorian society, her 1975 study laid some of the

groundwork for future studies of the formation of female activist networks in the

Progressive Era.

Robyn Muncy’s more contemporary study of Creating a Female Dominion in

American Reform reveals how the emotional and ideological bonds that were forged

within this exclusively female culture allowed reform-minded women to construct a

vehicle for social justice. During the late 1800’s, these activists were able to capitalize

on such Victorian prescriptions of acceptable female activity in order to serve others in

matters pertaining to child welfare. In the process of doing so, however, these women

were able to carve out new professions that sought to legitimize their participation in the

public sphere. Though the “female dominion” in American Reform eventually dissolved

in the late 1920’s, other women activists of this period had already taken steps to ensure a

more complete participation in the democratic process.

 As the video One Woman, One Vote illustrates, women who had been previously

united under causes such as temperance and child welfare reform were also able to take

advantage of Victorian ideals that praised female moral authority in order to demand the

right to vote. Working under the pretense that women were thought to be unsullied by

the corruption of public life, female activists drew upon their earlier Progressive Era

experiences to seek out a more lasting influence on social and political policy. Therefore,

suffragists effectively formed networks that worked both at the grassroots level and

within the halls of Congress to garner support for their cause.

However, the video shows that the more insidious remnants of Victorian “separate

spheres” ideology re-emerged as the women set out to march in public. In other words,

the blatant verbal and physical abuse and deliberate lack of police protection that the

female demonstrators endured reveals that the very activism of these women deemed

them “unladylike,” and therefore unworthy of chivalrous consideration. The fact that the

“Woman Suffrage Amendment” was ultimately saved by the single vote of a Tennessee

senator whose mother had convinced him to support the amendment, however, shows that

the positive effects of “Republican Motherhood” should not be so readily underestimated.

Though some of the ironically empowering effects of doctrines related to the

“Cult of True Womanhood” and “Republican Motherhood” allowed middle-class white

women to improve their own position within society at large, other historians attest that

minority and immigrant women were impacted differently. Creating a Female

Dominion in American Reform claims that the professional efforts of female social

workers intruded upon the agency and the cultural traditions of ethnic and African-

American mothers and midwives. Furthermore, Theda Purdue’s Cherokee Women and
the Trail of Tears demonstrates how “separate spheres” policies actually diminished the

tribal influence of Cherokee women in the early 1800’s.

Through increased contact with Anglo-American society and the efforts of

Protestant missionaries, “separate spheres” principles were eventually injected into

Cherokee culture. Purdue notes that the “ideal” social structure envisioned for the

Cherokees came to be defined as “one in which a man farmed and headed a household

composed only of his wife and children.” (95) Traditionally, Cherokee women had

enjoyed the authority derived from their coordination of agricultural production and the

matrilineal system of land inheritance. Purdue claims that as the Cherokees began to

adopt Anglo mores concerning “appropriate” gender roles, however, the power base of

native women eroded – eventually leading to the dislocation and subordination of the

entire tribe.

However, Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman argues that slave women were

largely exempted from the influence of the “separate spheres” doctrine. More

specifically, female slaves, in contrast to white women, were not hindered by

contemporary notions of female dependence and frailty. Furthermore, White attests that

the lack of black patriarchal authority within the slave community provided black women

with the opportunity to “forge their own independent definition of womanhood.” (141)

Because slave marriages did not provide traditional benefits such as male protection or

shared property, she claims, “slave men could not use the provision of subsistence goods

as leverage in the exercise of authority over women.” (153)

Nevertheless, the exclusion of black women from “separate spheres” principles

proved to be a double-edged sword. In short, their physical strength and independence

from black patriarchal dominance left them particularly vulnerable to white aggression.

Slave women, like any other woman who was unwilling or unable to adhere to

established prescriptions of proper female behavior, were deemed undeserving of

chivalrous consideration or protection.

Barbara Welter’s analysis of the construction of The Cult of True Womanhood can

be viewed as a continuation of Freidan’s previous attempts to expose the conspiratorial

forces that have sought to shape American gender identity. In the spirit of The Feminine

Mystique, Welter primarily draws from contemporary prescriptive literature to support

her hypothesis. Later feminist historiography, however, such as Carroll Smith-

Rosenberg’s The Female World of Love and Ritual employs the personal correspondence

of Victorian women to demonstrate that the “separate spheres” environment also served

to provide women with a strong network of female support and a sense of community

identity.

Furthermore, women’s historians came to recognize that the idealization of

female morality and virtue played a key part in the eventual empowerment of American

women. Since the mid-1980’s, however, feminist scholarship has also attempted to

demonstrate that such doctrines affected minority and working-class women in a different

manner. Largely excluded from the socioeconomic and educational privileges of white,

middle-class society, African-American, Native-American, blue-collar, and immigrant

women have had to struggle to carve out their own individual “spheres of influence”

within American society.

Question 3

During the nascent stages of modern feminist theory, scholars and activists

stressed the concept of the universal “sisterhood” of all women in the struggle for social

equality. Nevertheless, historians now seek to reveal the experiences of factions that

have been overlooked by previous scholarship. In particular, contemporary women’s

historiography identifies the racial, cultural, and economic factors that contradict the

notion that American women’s history should be analyzed on a monolithic “male versus

female” basis. Furthermore, “compensatory” women’s history has traditionally focused

on the efforts of white, northern, college-educated reformers and activists. For the

women who possessed neither the free time nor the education necessary for the pursuit of

such activities, however, the “female experience” was a bit more complicated.

Nancy Hewitt’s Beyond the Search for Sisterhood attempts to challenge such

“overly homogenous and singular history” that has overlooked racial and economic class

issues in the study of women’s history. (2) Since the mid-1980’s, modern historians have

made great strides in compiling the experiences of minority and working-class women

within their own communities and the outside world. Though women activists did

occasionally reach across class and color lines to unite for social change, they usually

“remained active only until their immediate goal was achieved.” (13) As this particular

type of women’s historiography evolves, therefore, it is increasingly evident that the

“sphere” of “true womanhood” did not entirely encompass all women. Rather, the extent
to which working-class and minority women were “uplifted” or restricted by such

doctrines was more dependent upon the division of labor as defined by their social class,

not their gender.

Jeanne Boydston’s To Earn Her Daily Bread how industrialization and the

increasing reliance on wage labor affected working-class families in the late nineteenth

century. In particular, she notes how working-class mothers scavenged, peddled, took in

boarders, and offered their domestic services for pay in other households in order to

contribute to the family economy. The “separate spheres” mentality prompted capitalist

society to ignore the economic value of women’s labor, however, and factory owners

opted to single-mindedly focus on a “living wage” for male employees rather than fully

measure the less-visible costs of supporting a household. In this sense, Boydston says,

“capital’s claim to the surplus value of the wife’s labor existed through and was

dependent upon the husband’s claim to that same value.” (90) Therefore, the working-

class men’s implicit acceptance of such bourgeois mores subjected their wives to the

more restrictive elements of the “separate spheres” doctrine without affording them the

leisure or instructional “uplift” that it promised for middle-class women.

However, Annelise Orleck’s From the Russian Pale to Labor Organizing in New

York City reveals the influence of immigrant proletariat culture on industrial workers’

attempts to form effective trade unions in the early 1900’s. The traditional position of

Jewish women as wage earners within their communities provided them with an

American experience that lay outside of the “Cult of True Womanhood.” These women

refused to subscribe to tenets of Victorian respectability and formed networks of radical

activists in their struggle for labor equality. Furthermore, Orleck recounts that though the
activists did not believe that those who “were not wage earners themselves could

understand the problem that workers faced,” they strategically allied across class lines

with middle and upper-class reformers in their attempts to organize. (319)

Robyn Muncy’s study of Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform,

however, reveals how middle-class female elites’ attempts to carve out their own identity

were sometimes carried out at the expense of lower-class women. Though female

reformers pushed for social change ostensibly out of their innate concern for the

betterment of society, they used their influence to subject the working-class women that

they “served” to rigid standards of bourgeois propriety and professionalism. Muncy’s

study reveals that these social workers’ preoccupation with the regulation and

standardization of midwives could be interpreted as the manifestation of their desire to

comparatively define themselves as “true women” and professionals.

Deborah Gray White also alludes to this phenomenon in Ar’n’t I a Woman. She

notes that the white woman’s sense of self-identity, “her self-esteem and perceived

superiority,” was dependent upon the “racism that debased black women.” In other

words, though white women were victims of the patriarchal restrictions that constructed

the frailty and dependency of their identity, their complicity in the continuation of the

subjugation of others should not be excused. If the contemporary study of women’s

history seeks to be fully inclusive, therefore, the role that elite women played in the

denigration of working-class and minority women should be further examined.