The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 9780300257984

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The Bonds of Womanhood

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The Bonds of Womanhood “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 JI With a New Preface

Nancy F. Cott A Veritas Paperback

Yale UNIVERSITY PREss

new haven and london

Veritas paperback edition, 2020 Copyright © 1977 by Yale University. Preface to the Veritas paperback edition copyright © 2020 by Yale University. Preface to second edition © 1997 by Yale University. The Bonds of Womanhood was originally published in 1977 by Yale University Press. The second edition was published in 1997 by Yale University Press. The Veritas paperback edition is based on the second edition. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Number 97-60429 ISBN: 978-0-300-25408-2 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents Estelle Hollander Falik and Max E. Falik

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Acknowledgments for the Second Edition   and the Veritas Paperback Edition

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Preface to the Veritas Paperback Edition

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Preface to the Second Edition List of Abbreviations

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Introduction 1 1. Work

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2. Domesticity

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3. Education

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4. Religion

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5. Sisterhood

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Conclusion: On “Woman’s Sphere”   and Feminism

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List of Women’s Documents Consulted

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List of Ministers’ Sermons Consulted

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Index 221

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The curators, archivists, and librarians in the libraries listed on the following page, and Faith L. Pepe of Westminster, Vermont, kindly assisted me in my search for source materials. I am also obliged to those libraries for permission to quote from documents in their collections. I remain indebted to John P. Demos for his suggestions and encouragement while I was writing my Ph.D. dissertation, which was the first version of this book. To the mentors and friends who generously commented on that earlier work and helped me to improve this one-especially Sacvan Bercovitch, Laurie Crumpacker, Ellen DuBois, David H. Fischer, Tamara K. Hareven, Aileen S. Kraditor, Mary Beth Norton, Kathryn Kish Sklar,.Judith Smith, Alan Trachtenberg, and Lise Vogel-and to Lynn Walterick of Yale University Press, who leavened the process of book production with both faith and work, I hope to express here some fraction of my sincere thanks; and to Lee Cott, a longerstanding appreciation, for improving the environment in more ways than one.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE SECOND EDITION I deeply appreciate the generous and astute responses of Ellen DuBois, Richard Wightman Fox, Nancy Hewitt, and Christine Stansell to an earlier draft of the preface to the sec­ond edition; their comments not only kept me from some gaffes but also made revising much more productive, and fun. Many thanks also to Chuck Grench and Tina Weiner for being enthusiastic about the idea of a twentieth anniversary edition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE VERITAS PAPERBACK EDITION Hearty thanks to Judy Smith, Margot Canaday, Emma Cott, and Stephen Vider for their comments on drafts of the new preface. Each one remarked on different items, and all were acutely helpful. I am lucky to have had their time and attention.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE SECOND EDITION I deeply appreciate the generous and astute responses of Ellen DuBois, Richard Wightman Fox, Nancy Hewitt, and Christine Stansell to an earlier draft of the preface to the sec­ond edition; their comments not only kept me from some gaffes but also made revising much more productive, and fun. Many thanks also to Chuck Grench and Tina Weiner for being enthusiastic about the idea of a twentieth anniversary edition.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR THE VERITAS PAPERBACK EDITION Hearty thanks to Judy Smith, Margot Canaday, Emma Cott, and Stephen Vider for their comments on drafts of the new preface. Each one remarked on different items, and all were acutely helpful. I am lucky to have had their time and attention.

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PREFACE TO THE VERITAS PAPERBACK EDITION I began the research that was the basis for this book almost a half-century ago. At the time, “women’s liberation” was in the air; the new women’s movement was at its height. The Equal Rights Amendment had been passed by both houses of Congress and was rapidly being ratified by dozens of states. I was in my twenties and had heady confidence in the power of women’s activism to change the world. As I began my research into the origins of the notion of “woman’s sphere,” I hoped to understand how American women had become so identified with the home and domestic occupations. I imagined that fifty years ahead, social differentiations and inequalities between men and women would be long gone. My forecast was naive, of course. The new word sexism caught on in the 1970s, but the phenomenon was not vanquished. Both qualitative and quantitative assessments today still reveal glaring asymmetries between women’s and men’s social and economic paths through life, and track their divergent outlooks on a gamut of issues from the intimate to the global. In an open-ended 2017 survey, Americans named the four top traits they thought society valued most in men to be honesty first, followed by financial success, ambition or leadership, and toughness; while for women, physical attractiveness led the list, followed by empathy, intelligence, and honesty (in a low fourth place).1 There’s nothing objec1. Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Renee Stapler, “Americans See Different Expectations for Men and Women,” Pew Research Center, On Gender Differences, No Consensus on Nature vs. Nurture, Dec. 5, 2017, https://www.

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tionable in gender difference per se—life would be duller if men and women merged into a single undifferentiated type. One might argue besides, to women’s credit, that leaders such as Angela Merkel of Germany and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, by displaying the distinctive compassion often attributed to their sex, have proved remarkably effective in governing and mobilizing their citizens during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020, a crisis that stymied many male leaders. The problem is that the persistent categorical differences we see—despite numerous exceptions—tend to reflect a power hierarchy not tremendously distant from what I described in The Bonds of Womanhood. I highlighted in this book the ways that the discourse of domesticity bound women to the home, and (more unexpectedly) bound women together in a social solidarity that became a new source of collective strength. Though women’s occupation in the household gained high praise in that era, it counted for less than what men did. Always directed “towards the needs of others” (p. 22), women’s work was secondary to men’s work, no matter how crucial to sustenance it might be. Today, similarly, most women are employed in the “helping” fields of health, education, and service, although far more publicity greets the advances of those in the learned professions and highly paid corporate or technical fields. Even now the two sexes are largely hired into “men’s” jobs and “women’s” jobs, and the latter are low paid, concentrated in areas that can be seen as extensions of women’s traditional household services of cooking, cleaning, and attending to the immediate needs of men, children, and elderly dependents. And in occupations where women are numerically dominant, as well as where men are, the median wages of women are lower than those of men. That pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/americans-see-different-expectations -for-men-and-women (accessed May 14, 2020).

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is why women number almost two-thirds of workers earning the minimum wage, while they compose just about half of the labor force.2 True, there is far more crossover now than ever before in what a given female or male person can choose to do or be with fair confidence in gaining approval and even applause from others. But major feminist arguments for eliminating gender differences, revolutionary in their time (and still), have not roused mass assent. I’m thinking here of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: Morrow, 1970), a foundational text of women’s liberation, which reasoned that human gestation and birth would have to become lab-based for true equality between the sexes to be achieved. Nor did enthusiasts adopt Susan Moller Okin’s philosophical analysis in Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), which concluded that members of heterosexual families would never reach equality without abolishing gender. Even in the 1970s only a tiny minority embraced the feminist ideal of “androgyny,” and today a similarly small number of gender-queer young people use the pronoun “they” and prefer not to declare themselves female or male. While recognition of LGBTQ identities has led one camp to protest and another to celebrate a proliferation of genders, the 2. See U.S. Department of Labor, “Employment and Earnings in Select Occupations,” [2017], https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/employment -earnings-occupations (accessed May 11, 2020); Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation 2019,” IWPR C490 Fact Sheet, March 2020, https://iwpr.org/publications/the-gender-wage-gap -by-occupation-2019/; Washington Center for Equitable Growth, “Gender Segregation at Work,” August 16, 2018, https://equitablegrowth.org/gender -segregation-at-work-separate-but-equal-or-inequitable-and-inefficient (accessed May 7, 2020); Kayla Patrick, “Low Wage Workers Are Women,” National Women’s Law Center, 2017, https://nwlc.org/blog/low-wage-workers-are-women -three-truths-and-a-few-misconceptions; National Women’s Law Center, “Minimum Wage,” https://nwlc.org/issue/minimum-wage (accessed May 5, 2020).

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standard two remain in command. Acceptance of variant sexualities and sexual behaviors has, in some ways surprisingly, advanced faster than a larger revolution in gender definition per se. Most of straight society approved samesex couples’ right to marry far more quickly than might have been expected, for example, and became accustomed to the flourishing lives of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual individuals. The growing presence of transgender individuals and improved technologies to accomplish transition have further complicated what gender means. The steady decline in overall marriage rates, to the extent that only half of American adults say they are currently married, is also noticeable. But whether these developments show purposeful revolt against typical gender assignments remains a guessing game. To young adults, the past is unrecognizable and the extent of change seems obvious. Opportunities absolutely foreclosed to women in the era of The Bonds of Womanhood stand open now, peppering the news with women in every field, from small business owners to CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, from astronauts to credible contenders for the U.S. presidency. Men no longer monopolize the educational, economic, and political privileges sought by early women’s rights reformers. Nor do men as blithely expect all home needs and childcare to belong to women. Fathers (by self-report in 2016) have tripled the time per week they spend with their minor children since 1965, and have increased their hours in housework almost as much.3 Yet the continuities are striking. More than three-quarters of Americans surveyed recently acknowledged that women feel “a lot” of pressure to be intimately involved with their 3. See Gretchen Livingston and Kim Parker, “8 Facts About American Dads,” Pew Research Center, June 12, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org /fact-tank/2019/06/12/fathers-day-facts (accessed May 5, 2020), drawing on a 2016 survey.

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children’s lives, whereas men feel “a lot” of pressure to be the breadwinner for their families; only 40 percent agreed that the pressure also operates the other way around. A sociologist examining the stressful home and work burdens of parents accentuated “enormously powerful cultural expectations of who we are and how we’re supposed to act; the work-devoted ideal worker, the self-sacrificing ideal mother and the distant provider father.” Revivified expectations for “intensive mothering” led her to say that the “gender revolution” was “stalled.”4 That tripled time fathers now spend with their children is only eight hours per week, while mothers report spending fourteen (up from ten in 1965). Where fathers claim to average ten hours per week on housework, mothers say eighteen. Similarly, during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, when employed parents and their schoolage children had to stay at home together for weeks on end, more of the “care work” seemingly inevitably landed on mothers.5 Some might argue that these results stem from preferences of both men and women, or from suitabilities biologically inbuilt in sex chromosomes or hormones. The implicit gender biases of policy makers and employers are taken too rarely into account. Untangling accurately what is biological from what is socially derived and patterned has often proved fruitless, and Americans’ views of the weight of nature versus nurture in the appearance of gender differences varies 4. Brigid Schulte, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (New York: Picador, 2015). 5. Livingston and Parker, “8 Facts About American Dads,” and Claire Cain Miller, “Three Things Lockdowns Have Exposed About Working and Parenting,” The Upshot, New York Times, April 27, 2020, https://www .nytimes.com/2020/04/27/upshot/coronavirus-exposes-workplace-truths .html (accessed May 26, 2020); and Brigid Schulte, “What Moms Always Knew About Working from Home,” editorial, New York Times, April 6, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/06/opinion/Coronavirus-remotework.html (accessed May 3, 2020).

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widely—including by gender. (Regarding gender differences in workplace attributes, for example, 61 percent of men surveyed said these stemmed from biological differences rather than social expectations, but 65 percent of women thought it was the other way around.)6 In previous centuries, “science” easily claimed that inborn sexual differences dictated divergent characters and social roles for the two sexes. I recall, for example, Ludmilla Jordanova’s brilliant analysis of the Enlightenment use of the newly invented concept of temperament, which joined physical with mental or emotional characteristics, to prescribe a particular role for women. The capacity of the female body to swell to accommodate pregnancy and then retract successfully afterward was taken to indicate a special sex-linked physical malleability of women’s “fibers”; this was then interpreted to mean that women’s minds and outlooks were pliable, too. Thus women were naturally “complaisant,” happy to bend to the wishes and desires of others—of men, that is.7 In the era covered in The Bonds of Womanhood, “the heart,” meaning the emotions or sentiments, was assumed to dominate women’s behavior, while “the head,” where rationality, judgment, and wisdom prevailed, ruled men. The opposition was considered necessary and proper. Didactic literature anchored women’s goals in the interpersonal or relational realm, on the premise “that women would be happy 6. Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Renee Stepler, “Americans Are Divided on Whether Differences Between Men and Women Are Rooted in Biology or Societal Expectations,” Pew Research Center, On Gender Differences, No Consensus on Nature vs. Nurture, Dec. 5, 2017, https://www. pewsocialtrends.org/2017/12/05/americans-are-divided-on-whether -differences-between-men-and-women-are-rooted-in-biology-or-societal -expectations (accessed May 26, 2020). 7. Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); see also Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

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insofar as they served others and made them happy” (p. 71). These ancient assumptions still echo today, despite meeting opposition.8 Just recently, a movie critic observed that in the romantic comedy genre, the undemanding and vulnerable sweetheart who asks nothing of her suitor except to depend on him gets her man, while the assertive, audacious, and often professionally accomplished girlfriend gets dumped. The woman who uses her head and takes initiative loses to the woman who demurs.9 Perhaps I should conclude that because gender stereotypes persist, they are true. Social science studies occasionally appear to confirm them—yet such research should always provoke skepticism. Researchers, whatever their inherent biases, prefer to report difference rather than sameness between the sexes, since difference always seems more noteworthy. Perhaps gender stereotypes persist because most people like them and believe that the existence of basic differences between men and women explains behaviors, attractions, and conflicts that are otherwise inexplicable. These “natural” roles are everywhere reinforced, with preparation for them beginning at birth—if not before. In a never-ending circle between advertising, marketing, and consumers’ anticipated preferences, pajamas meant for infant girls are dotted with unicorns or flowers, and the only alternatives are baseball bats or firetrucks to adorn infant boys. A toy seller must know “is the gift for a girl or a boy?” to help a prospective buyer. It’s worth asking why the present, despite its conspicuous modernity, looks as much like the past as it does in gender 8. See, for example, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species (New York: Ballantine, 2000); and Anne FaustoSterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men (New York: Basic, 1985). 9. Alexis Soloski, “High-Strung? Your Time Is Short,” New York Times, May 2, 2020.

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attributes, and in the ways that couples relate to one another, to their work, and to their communities. The Bonds of Womanhood may, I hope, continue to contribute to the pursuit of answers. Nancy F. Cott May 2020

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Then and Since This twentieth anniversary edition provides an opportunity to look backward to my writing of The Bonds of Womanhood and forward from it to other historians' subsequent attention to the meaning of domesticity and "woman's sphere." The project really originated in 1972, when I was finishing a collection of documents in United States women's history, Root of Bitterness, and was formulating my doctoral dissertation. Both the anthology of documents and the method of the dissertation shared a common emphasis on finding the personal "voices" of nonfamous women of the past in their untapped private writings. 1 In the women's movement of the previous several years I had, like hundreds of thousands of other women, reeducated myself by discovering new intellectual premises that made it possible to see women as subjects in history (and agents of change) as never before. To locate women as subjects, no sources seemed more promising-less tainted by stereotypes or unwarranted assumptions about femininity-than the ones women had penned for themselves and to other women. My assumptions owed a great deal (more than I recognized at the time) to the emphasis on women's consciousness and on "consciousness-raising" in the women's liberation movement, of which I felt myself a part. Consciousness-raising was I. I completed my dissertation in 1974. Root of Bitterness: Documents of the Social History of American Women was first published by E. P. Dutton in 1972. I have recently collaborated with Jeanne Boydston, Ann Braude, Lori D. Ginzberg, and Molly Ladd-Taylor on a thoroughly revised-indeed almost entirely new-edition of this anthology, published under the same title by Northeastern University Press, 1996.

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a political strategy: in all-female groups, women shared reflections on their lives, with the intent to recognize and confront the ways that they had been taught to be "women" (that is, to conform to the gender expectations and constraints that created sexual inequality). The aim was to undermine or throw off one's socialization and change the structures that maintained it. The heady dynamic of consciousness-raising made me very interested in questions about consciousness in the past: had women been aware of themselves as women, and how had they been aware? The likeliest place to discover answers seemed to be in private writings. An important historical question motivated my research, too, and that had to do with the efflorescence of didactic writings about womanhood and family life in the urban northeast of the United States in the 1820s and 1830s. When I began my project, historian Barbara Welter had already discerned an antebellum "cult of true womanhood" and Aileen S. Kraditor a "cult of domesticity" (the term I preferred, because it went beyond insular consideration of women's roles to include all family members). The motivation for this cultural phenomenon centering on families was not clear to me, however, nor had historians adequately explained the part played by the very women addressed and described in didactic writings. Women appeared dictated to, the objects of social prescription. 2 Schooled in the new social history's emphasis on specifying class and community, I decided to focus on middle-class women in New England, where so much of the writing on women's place in the home was produced, and to begin not in the 1830s but a half-century earlier. My approach was in2. See Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarter(y 18 (1963), 151-74, and Aileen S. Kraditor, Up from the Pede.stat: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970). Neither in recalling here what works influenced me, nor in mentioning works on related themes following mine, am I trying for comprehensiveness; this essay is a very selective and idiosyncratic historiographical review.

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formed by feeling that the first as well as the second half of Marx's memorable dictum, "Men make their own history, but they do not make itjust as they please," ought to apply to women, too. 3 I figured that if the cult of domesticity had been quite widespread, then women could not have been only its dupes or victims but must have participated in creating it, even if not controlling its extent or consequences. (The same conviction led me to investigate the origins of nineteenth-century belief in women's "passionlessness," which was the first item I puzzled through in my dissertation, in 1972; I separated that chapter from The Bonds of Womanhood, however, and did not publish it until the late 1970s.) 4 Just as the emphasis on consciousness in the women's movement drew from a deep well of socialist thinking and organizing around class consciousness, my insistence on seeing women, however subordinated, as active shapers of their own circumstances was ineffably influenced by the socialist historian E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, in whose huge shadow the new social history and feminist history grew up. 5 My aim, then, was to see how middle-class women's experience and concomitant outlook in the decades leading toward the 1820s anci 1830s matched or confronted (or possibly produced) the prescriptive "canon" of domesticity, 3. Marx is referring, of course, to the weight of history, continuing "they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and trai;\smitted from the past." The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International, [1935]) , p. 13. 4. "Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 17901850," Signs 4:2 (1978), 219-36. 5. Edward P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963). I was also educated by socialist-feminist historians influenced by Thompson, notably Mari Jo Buhle, Ann G. Gordon, and Nancy Schrom, "Women in American Society: An Historical Contribution," Radical America 5:4 Uuly-August 1971), 3--66, and Juliet Mitchell, "The Longest Revolution," New Left Review (November-December 1966) and Womans Estate (New York: Pantheon, 1971) .

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as I came to call it. 6 I began with women's work, assuming some priority for economic causation, for I was investigating a period of thoroughgoing economic change that affected both sexes and all ages. Women's diaries and letters revealed to me what looked like a constant in the midst of change: married women's main work remained in the household while its productive scope, especially in urban locations, contracted. Following Thompson's distinction between the traditional task-orientation of preindustrial work and the rigid requirements of time-disciplined capitalism, I found this persistence of married women's task-oriented household occupation to be signally important, the emblem and engine of categorical differentiation of women, as a group, from men. 7 As I researched and wrote, I was struck by the ways in which not only economic change but also cultural authorities, particularly educators and ministers, unintentionally conspired to make gender visible as a social classification, thus refashioning womanhood as a social role. Women's own sense of who they were was undergoing social reconstruction. In my reading of the evidence, if most women were properly constrained by new awareness of what a "woman" should be and do, others were able to make unanticipated uses of this conviction. Looking back now, I realize that I was riveted on issues of these middle-class white women's consciousness-how they thought about themselves in relation to men and to the rest of their world, in analogy to what was transpiring among middle-class white women around me at the time. I considered it crucial to trace the developing awareness among this group of women that they were "classed by sex." (It was, of 6. Kathryn Kish Sklar·s magnificent biography Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) appeared while I was writing, and established Catharine Beecher's major role in envisioning and publicizing values of domesticity. 7. E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967).

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course, a tenet of women's liberation of the period that such awareness was a precondition for feminism.) To put it another way, I was pursuing the insight with which Amy Dru Stanley opens a 1996 essay: "What we know as the market revolution posed a momentous moral problem that contemporaries, in the first instance, understood as a problem of gender. "8 I proposed that men and women trying to make sense of their transformed world engineered an ideology of gender, and one of its consequences was to educe "womanhood" as a social role as well as a sexual category. Although readers haven't always agreed, I have always seen the heart of the book to be the second chapter, which analyzes the uses and contradictions of the constellation of ideas and practices called "domesticity." Re-reading The Bonds of Womanhood today, I see it as asserting that a discourse of domesticity was established in this time period. In the early and mid- l 970s I was not cognizant of this sense of discourse (derived mainly from Michel Foucault); I was, however, trying to capture the ways that ideology and experience were reciprocally influential or mutually constitutive. 9 Now I can take advantage of the concept of discourse, especially as presented in Gail Bederman's very clear yet subtle definition: 8. Arny Dru Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market," in The Market Revolution in America, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), p. 74. 9. The subtitle of my dissertation was "Perspectives on Female Experience and Consciousness in New England, 1'780-1830." My notion of experience was indebted to E. P. Thompson, whose approach Joan W. Scott has elegantly summed up (in order to reject it): "Thompson specifically set out to free the concept of 'class' from the ossified categories of Marxist stmcturalism. For this project 'experience' was a key concept. His notion of experience joined ideas of external influence and subjective feeling, the stmctural and the psychological. This gave Thompson a mediating influence between social structure and social consciousness. For him experience meant 'social being'-the lived realities of social life, especially the affective domains of family and religion and the symbolic dimensions of expression." Joan W. Scott, "'Experience,' " in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 29.

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"a set of ideas and practices which, taken together, organize both the way a society defines certain truths about itself and the way it deploys social power." As Bederman points out, such a concept of discourse gets beyond-really disavowsthe Marxist-derived distinction between (material) base and (superstructural) ideology. Thinking in terms of discourse means assuming that ideology and institutions, beliefs and "social realities" (Foucault himself stressed knowledge and power) are necessarily intermeshed. Although some historians shy away from the notion of discourse as overly determining of human actions, ideas and practices identifiable as a discourse wielding and representing social power should not be a~sumed to be seamless or utterly consistent, as Bederman emphasizes. Rather they are inevitably internally contradictory, somewhat ambiguous, and variously deployed. That ambiguity or inconsistency leaves open the possibility for slippage, for resistant interpretations, for shifts, or for seizing of opportunities by individuals, which may reorder power relations. 10 Using such a definition, I think it makes sense to speak of domesticity as a discourse in nineteenth-century America, both a cardinal value and a daily practice of the prosperous and property-owning classes, the instigators and main bene10. Gail Bederman, ManlinesJ and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 24. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 100-102. Certainly many historians have recognized the inextricability of ideas and practices, or ideology and institutions, without using the term discourse, as for instance Gordon Wood's comment that the "collective cultu'3.I system that we have assimilated, consciously or unconsciously, suffuses all parts of our mind and in effect creates our behavior. It does so by forcing us to describe that behavior in its terms. Our actions tend to be circumscribed by the ways we can make them meaningful . .. with respect to an inherited system of social rules, conventions, and values." "Intellectual History and the Social Sciences," in New Directions in American Intellectual History, ed.John Higham and Paul Conkin (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 35.

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ficiaries of "the market revolution." 11 By the discourse of domesticity I mean the ideological presumptions, institutional practices, and strongly held habits of mind insisting that the home must be guided by a calm, devoted, and self-abnegating wife and mother: that with her presence, the home would serve-and it had to serve, for social order and individual well-being-as a moral beacon, a restorative haven from the anxieties and adversities of public life and commerce, comforting the hardworking husband and provider for the family, and furnishing a nursery of spiritual and civic values for the children. The Bonds of Womanhood outlined how gender conventions were embodied in the discourse of domesticity, and how the discourse purveyed gender meanings. It focused on women rather than on how individuals of both sexes and all ages were involved. In the two decades since I wrote the book, I have thought a good deal more about the ways that domesticity ensnared men, too, as well as empowering them, shaping a ruling definition of manliness around the provider role to be taken by the husband/father. Questions like this have begun to be explored as a result of many feminist scholars' emphasis that gender, as a system of meanings given to sexual difference, is always relational, defining female in relation to male, femininity in relation to masculinity. 12 I now think of domesticity as a discourse through layers of subsequent scholarship that have vivified and enriched 1 I. I began to re-view domesticity in this light in 1992, when I was asked to contribute the entry on it for A Companion to American Thought, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and James Kloppenberg (Cambridge: Ba~il Blackwell, 1995); some of my language here is taken from that entry. Note Charles Sellers' confident assertion, in The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 237: "The so-called middle class was constituted not by mode and relations of production but by ideology." 12. A pioneering work was Charles Rosenberg, "Sexuality, Class and Role in 19th.Century America," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973), 131-53; more recent

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my original thinking-dialectical exchanges among historians that show domesticity to have been, in fact, a more powerful discourse and one with more ramifications than I realized at the time I first investigated the subject. A number of important works following The Bonds of Womanhood that were more keenly attuned to class formation and conflict established the view that the discourse of domesticity was a prime means by which members of the ascendant middle class understood themselves as men and women and presented themselves to the world. Mary P. Ryan's influential Cradle of the Middle Class ( 1981), a fine-grained community study of economic, religious, communal, and family activities in the antebellum boom town of Utica, New York, showed how the emergence of a commercial bourgeoisie relied on the institution of family practices of domesticity. Christine Stansell, by focusing on the laboring poor, opened a new vein of analysis revealing the aggressively reformist uses of the discourse of domesticity and the ways that middle-class women and men used it both to clarify their own cultural identity and to attempt to transform the poor into their own image. Writing in 1982, and forecasting some part of her 1986 book City of Women, Stansell began with the premise that the mid-century middle class, if "economically ill-defined," made "the ideology of domesticity ... central to its self-conception." Stansell's work, documenting vividly the prevalence of street life, scrounging, efforts include Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen, eds., Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), and Robert L. Griswold, Fatherhood in America: A History (New York: Basic Books, 1993). No one has done more to elevate the view that gender ought to be understood relationally and as a means to signify power than Joan W. Scott; see "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review 91 (December 1986) , 1053-76.

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and socializing among poor urban women and their families, was especially acute in showing how self-aggrandizing were the claims of white middle-class women, subjects and proponents of domesticity, who assumed that their view of the home described and included (potentially) all women. 13 A weighty work of British history by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes ( 1987), filled in the emerging portrait. Painstakingly documenting how gender beliefs and women's family practices enabled the middle class not only to establish a cultural identity and promulgate its worldview but to consolidate its assets, Davidoff and Hall challenged, perhaps more effectively than historians of the United States, the nineteenth-century rhetoric that the home was a private realm, separate from the public world in which men pursued wealth and power. 14 Aside from dovetailing the making of class and gender identities, women's historians unsettled the nineteenth-century notion that the home was separate from the public world by showing the continued involvement of households in economic production and thus the engagement of women, including wives, in work destined for the market.Joan Jensen's work was signal here, but many scholars contributed to the effort to reveal and confute the wishful thinking involved in nineteenth13. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Christine Stansell, "Women, Children, and the Uses of the Street: Class and Gender Conflict in New York City, 1850-1860," Feminist Stttdies 8 (Summer 1982), 309-35 (quotation from 310), and City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 17891865 (New York: Knopf, 1986). 14. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); cf. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1790-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), esp. 138-91.

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century speakers' insistence that "woman's sphere" was a "separate sphere." 15 Jeanne Boydston's Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic ( 1990) offered the most sophisticated approach to this problem. 16 Ingeniously documenting the constancy and economic value of working-class and middle-class women's unpaid labor of housework, she argued persuasively that this labor by women, far from being extrinsic to the process of capitalist industrialization, was essential to it. Yet the economic content and value of housework were rendered invisible by the discursive mandate of woman's "separate" sphere. Boydston's approach developed far more systematically my assertion in The Bonds of Womanhood that women occupied at home were not leisured, and she confronted head-on the dogma that such occupation was not economically productive. Her argument for the purposive "pastoralization" of housework-the didactic conversion by which woman's work at home was understood as a way of being rather than as labor-extended the argument of my second chapter, which analyzed the "central convention" of domesticity, the discursive contrast between home and world and the way it constructed a "vocation" for womanhood. While seeking material reasons for the credibility of the rhetorical onslaught, in The Bonds of Womanhood I aimed 15. See Joan Jensen, "Cloth, Butter and Boarders: Women's Household Production for the Market," Review of Radical Political Economics 12 (Summer 1980), 14-24, and Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Elizabeth H. Pleck, "Two Worlds in One: Work and Family," Journal of Social History 10:2 (1976), 178-95; Thomas Dublin, "Women and Outwork in a Nineteenth-Century New England Town," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Nancy Grey Osterud, "'She Helped Me Hay It as Good a~ a Man,·" in To Toil the Livelong Day, ed. Carol Groneman and Mary Beth Norton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 16. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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not to concretize but to problematize and explore the consequences of early nineteenth-century rhetoric posing home and world as antitheses.17 From the quotation marks around "woman 's sphere" in the subtitle to numerous usages such as canon, doctrine, ideology, convention, and rhetoric to denote domesticity, I employed various means to indicate this. Likewise, my recognition of the legal doctrine of coverture, which meant that wives' labor and property-their very beings in the eyes of the law-were their husbands' to command, infused my presentation of domesticity. The rhetorical claim that wives could create a haven at home because they were "disinterested," having no individual economic interests to pursue, for instance, reflected and reinforced coverture's award of wives' labor power to their husbands while it appeared to differentiate the values of the home from those of the marketplace. I was convinced that the mistaken image of women at home as leisured came from aligning three pairs of polarities that were not really congruent-woman/man, home/world, and leisure/work-but I did not explore this at length nor envision the tremendous interest in the gender dimensions of the private/public distinction that would follow in the 1980s. Through that decade, historians grappled with the question whether the categories of "private" and "public," their available meanings historically inflected by the rhetoric of separate spheres, were 17. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's important essay "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America," Signs 1 (1975), 1-29, impressed many readers with the notion that nineteenth-century men and women inhabited separate worlds (at least in a psychological and emotional sense), and some may have merged Smith-Rosenberg's portrayal of a "female world" with mine. I tried to stress, however, that the "bonds of womanhood" were constructed as complementary to (rather than separate from) men's presence and authority. I benefitted greatly from Smith-Rosenberg's early essay, "Beauty, the Beast, and the Militant Woman," American Quarterly 23 (1971) , but "The Female World" was published after I had already written The Bonds of Womanhood.

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usable in the late twentieth century or had to be discarded as artifacts, themselves, of the discourse of domesticity. 18 Historians such as Nancy Hewitt writing during the 1980s renovated my view by insisting that women such as those I had discussed were at least as much wedded, figuratively as well as literally, to men of their own class as to the general category of womanhood. 19 No doubt because I was so interested in gender formation and the development of hegemonic notions of womanhood, I succumbed to some extent to the universalizing pretensions of the discourse of domesticity-tending, that is, not to look for alternatives to the set of ideas and practices emanating from the prosperous white middle class, and assuming too broad a reach for the shared womanhood that my subjects envisioned. If historians of the 1970s disaggregated gender from other considerations to make it visible, their successors refocused attention on the way that gender meanings were inflected by and constituted within economic status, class, racial, and ethnic identity. Gender discourse thus could be understood as an arena of selfdefinition and of conflict not only between men and women of the white middle class or another specified ethnic or class group, but also, for example, between African-American slaves and their white m~sters, or Irish Catholic immigrants and Protestant providers of outdoor relief. Dissonance and subversion within the discourse of domesticity, the multiple possibilities for action, and certainly for consciousness of oneself as a woman or man appeared far more extensive as a 18. Linda K. Kerber's essay, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History 75 (June 1988), 9-39, summed up late-1980s restiveness with separate spheres rhetoric. Cf. Carole Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in Public and Private in Social Life, ed. S. I. Benn and G. F. Gaus (London: Croom Helm, 1983), pp. 281-303. 19. Hewitt, "Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980s," Social History 10:3 (October 1985), 299-321. See also her Women's Activism and Social Change: &chester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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result of attention to complex self-definitions. 20 More recent historians have shown how groups denied access to the material conditions of domesticity have sought its prerogatives as a form of resistance to the preponderant power of the propertied classes: thus ex-slave families collaborated in denying the field labor of their wives and mothers to white landowners, so that these women could work in their own homes; and industrial workers in the late nineteenth century asserted their right to a family wage earned by the male head of household. 21 These intended subversive as well as dominant uses-which indicate the different ways a discourse can be grasped and reinterpreted-had the ironic effect of deepening the hold of domesticity as an American practice and worldview, even as they complicated what the discourse meant. The same can be said of middle-class women's redeployment of domestic values as they tried to exert social power through reform organizations such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and women's clubs. Such women's groups adopted ruling presuppositions about maternal goodness and guidance, turning them toward so20. Especially important here was scholarship on southern and working-class women, such as Susan Levine, "Labor's True Woman: Domesticity and Equal Rights in the Knights of Labor," Journal of American History 70:2 (1983), 323-40; Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, I 784-1860 (New York: Norton, 1984); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n 't I a Woman 1 Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985); Ruth Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest (Boston: Routledge, 1985); Dolores E. Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); and Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Within the Plantation Household (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988) . 21. See, for example, Martha May, "Bread before Roses: American Workingmen, Labor Unions, and the Family Wage," in Milkman, ed., Women, Work and Protest, pp. 1-21, and Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985), pp. 44-78, the latter especially effective in making the point that freed slaves' own reasons rather than "imitation" of whites motivated their pursuit of domesticity.

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cial and public goals in the effort to create what Sara Evans has called a "maternal commonwealth. "22 It was the genius of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie to make the contingent family pattern of domesticity seem necessary and, without acknowledging contradiction, to accept it as natural while trumpeting it as the height of civilization. Having been a value and a sign of a particular class, forwarded by that class as a universal norm, the discourse of domesticity evolved (especially during the half-century of national consolidation after the Civil War) into a national standard, used to understand, measure, and invite in or cast out cultural and racial groups such as Mormons, Asians, and freed blacks, as well as diverse Europeans. It figured prominently in philanthropy and reform of many sorts. Stansell pointed out how moral and social reformers at mid-century attacked the problem of urban poverty in the language of domesticity, intending to impress upon the poor who peddled and scavenged on city streets that children should be off the streets, the wife and mother at home, the husband and father at work. Similarly, both government authorities and Christian missionaries cited Native Americans' divergence from the values of domesticity to justify intervention, renovation, or coercive actions. The "solution" devised by reformers in the 1870s and 1880s to the "Indian problem" involved land allotment to individual family households, making the men property owners and the women housekeepers. Throughout the surges of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, immigrants' adherence to standards of domesticity was judged a principal criterion of their suitability for American life. Whether they were Russian Jews in New York City or Mexican Catholics in California, the prescription they were handed for fitting in and gaining the attributes of citizens looked 22. Sara M. Evans, Born/or Liberty (New York: Free Press, 1989), pp. 119-44.

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remarkably similar. Likewise, American foreign missionaries applied their own domestic values to the "heathen" abroad, and saw evidence of Christianization in the attainment of domesticity. 23 Indeed, the very capaciousness of the discourse of domesticity-the many endeavors that have been justified or enacted in its name-may throw doubt on a proposition of The Bonds of Womanhood, that consciousness of womanhood fostered by domesticity underlay the emergence of women's rights advocacy. If domestic discourse has had so many incarnations, should one then expect feminism to be nurtured in every case? I think not, and the book does not point in that direction: it sees group-consciousness of womanhood as only a precondition for demanding women's rights, not an automatic route toward that destination. The double edge of such group-consciousness, and how it could lend itself to conservative policing of boundaries around feminine propriety ( especially within the formative environment of evangelical Protestantism) is a minor theme in The Bonds of Womanhood. Mary P. Ryan more forcefully made the point in 1979, as the New Right forced itself on contemporary poli-

23. See, for example, Robert Trennert, "Educating Girls in Nonreseivation Boarding Schools, 1878--1920," Western Historical Quarterly (July 1982), 271-90; Theda Perdue, "Southern Indians and the Cult of True Womanhood," The Web of Southern Social Relations, ed. Walter J. Fraser,Jr., et al. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 35-51; Gwendolyn Mink, "The Lady and the Tramp: Gender, Race, and the Origins of the American Welfare State," in Women, the State, and Welfare, ed. Linda Gordon (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 92-122, and George Sanchez, "'Go after the Women': Americanization and the Mexican-American Woman, 1915-1929," in Unequal Sisters, ed. Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 284-97; Joan Brum berg, "Zenanas and Girlless Villages: The Ethnology of American Evangelical Women, 1870-1910," Journal of American History 69 (1982), 347-71; Patricia Grimshaw, Paths of Duty: American Missionary Wives in Nineteenth-Century Hawaii (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral A41,thurity in the American West, 1874-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

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tics, and feminist scholars since have taken up the question of conservative and anti-feminist women's political activism. 24 Also, it is not incidental that The Bonds of Womanhood finds the potential for the critical edge of women's rights' advocacy among women of the culturally dominant white middle class. It seems to me that the women most likely to organize around the "disabilities" of sex in a representative democracy are those who share the privileges of dominant men with respect to ethnicity, race, wealth, religion, and so on, while women of the poor and of oppressed minorities are likely to feel goaded by other social resentments. 25 For some time, historians have asserted that women's rights advocacy in the United States has been dominated by white middleclass women. 26 Yet, obviously, it is only a small minority of 24. See Mary P. Ryan, "The Power of Women's Networks: A Case Study of Female Moral Reform in Antebellum America," Feminist Studies 5:1 (Spring 1979), 66-86; Rebecca E. Klatch, Women of the New Right (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), Gender & History: Special Issue on Gender and the Right 3:3 (Autumn 1991); Kathleen M. Blee, Women of the Klan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 25. See my The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and "What's in a Name? The Limits of 'Social Feminism,' or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History," journal of American History 76 (December 1989), 809-29. 26. Alice Rossi raised the issue in terms of "status politics" in her stimulating early essay "Social Roots of the Woman's Movement" in her collection, The Feminist Papers (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973), pp. 241-81. Both William O'Neill, Everyone Was Brave: A History of Feminism in America (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), and Aileen S. Kraditor, Ideas of the Woman Suf /rage Movement, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), acknowledged "middle-class" predominance in the women's rights movement, without probing or specifying it. For more serious consideration of class issues in nineteenth-century women's movements, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Womens Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union (New York: Basic Books, 1981 ); Barbara Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement (New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

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that class who are thus motivated rather than complacent. Indeed, as Nancy Hewitt, Ellen DuBois, and others have shown, the inspiration for those white middle-class women who have spoken out on the injustice of sex inequality can often be traced to their perception of or participation in struggles against race or class injustice; they may be drawn to women's rights because of their particular placement within middleclass ranks, or because they admire the leadership of working-class women, or see an analogy between sex and race exclusion, and so on. 27 There are many paths to (as well as away from) feminism, better understood now than when I wrote this book not only because of the work of historians but also because of the generational changes within the late twentieth-century women's movement. Yet such magnification of understanding does not undo the insight in The Bonds of Womanhood that there is likely an important relationship among an elaborated discourse of domesticity, the sex-consciousness that women at the center of it thereby gain, and the potential for women's rights activity. I continue to find this insight productive, without drawing the conclusion that this is the only dynamic of feminist awareness. For instance, rather than presuming that the relationship between the 1950s "feminine mystique" and the 1960s upsurge of feminism was one between repression and rebellion, I would guess that the 1950s emphasis on women's difference from men was (paradoxically) an enabling factor, one that exploded the interwar illusion that men and women had achieved social parity. Like any work of human creation, The Bonds of Womanhood cannot escape the specificity of its origin. If it speaks of 27. See, for example, Sara M. Evans, Personal Politics (New York: Random, 1979); Meredith Tax, The Rising of the Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1980); Nancy Hewitt, "Feminist Friends: Agrarian Quakers and the Emergence of Women's Rights in America," Feminist St.udies 12 (Spring 1986), 27-49; Ellen Carol DuBois, "Working Women, Class Relations, and Suffrage Militance," Journal of American History 74 (June 1987), 34-58.

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the early 1970s as well as of the early nineteenth century, perhaps that will reemphasize one of the things it intended to communicate: that notions of gender are continually mutable-historical products always in the making and remaking-in every time and place being forged, disseminated, contested, reworked, and in some guise reaffirmed.

Nancy F. Cott January 1997

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Locations of manuscripts cited: AAS

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts BPL Boston Public Library Rare Book Room, Boston, Massachusetts CHS Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, Connecticut CL Congregational Library, Boston, Massachusetts CSL Connecticut State Library, Hartford, Connecticut EI James Duncan Phillips Library , Essex Institute, Salem, Massachusetts HCL Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts HD Historic Deerfield Library, Deerfield, Massachusetts Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MassaMHS chusetts MeHS Maine ~istorical Society, Portland, Maine NEHGS New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, Massachusetts New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, NHHS New Hampshire Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the SL History of Women in America, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts SML Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut V crmont Historical Society, Montpelier, VerVHS mont

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Worcester Historical Society, Worcester, Massachusetts

Journals cited: American Historical Review American Quarterly Feminist Studies Journal of American History Journal of Interdisciplinary History Journal of Social History ]SH MVHR Mississippi Valley Historz"cal Review NEHGR New England Historic Genealogical Register William and Mary Quarterly WMQ AHR

AQ FS ]AH ]IH

INTRODUCTION "Thine in the bonds of womanhood" Sarah M. Grimke signed the letters to Mary Parker which she published in Boston in 1838 as Letters on the Equalz"ty of the Sexes and the Conditz"on of Women. Grimke had left behind the South Carolina plantation of her birth and become one of the first women to speak publicly against slavery. "Bonds" symbolized chattel slavery to her. She must have composed her phrase with care, endowing it intentionally with the double meaning that womanhood bound women together even as it bound them down. It is a central purpose of mine to explain why an American feminist of the 1830s would have seen womanhood in that dual aspect. When I began, I had a slightly different intent. I wanted to know how a certain congeries of social attitudes that has been called the "cult of true womanhood" and the "cult of domesticity," and first became conspicuous in the early nineteenth century, related to women's actual circumstances, experiences, and consciousness.1 Within this "cult" (it might almost be called a social l. William R. Taylor, I believe, was the first among recent scholars to use the term "domesticity" in this sense, in an unpublished paper prepared for the Symposium on the Role of Education in Nineteenth-Century America, at Chatham, Mass., 1964, "Domesticity in England and America, 1770-1840." I thank Prof. Taylor for lending the paper to me in 1973. Barbara Welter named the "cult of true womanhood" in an article of that title, in AQ 18 (1966): 151-74. Aileen S. Kraditor introduced the phrase "cult of domesticity" in her introduction to Up from the Pedestal: Selected Writings in the History of American Feminism (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

1

2

INTRODUCTION

ethic), mother, father, and children grouped together in the private household ruled the transmission of culture, the maintenance of social stability, and the pursuit of happiness; the family's influence reached outward, underlying success or failure in church and state, and inward, creating individual character. Not the understanding of families as cells making up the body of society but the emphasis placed on and agencies attributed to the family unit were new, and the importance given to women's roles as wives, mothers, and mistresses of households was unprecedented. The ministers, educators, and pious and educated women in the northern United States whose published writings principally documented this ethic made women's presence the essence of successful homes and families. Conversely, the "cult" both observed and prescribed specific behavior for women in the enactment of domestic life. I began (as had others before me) by investigating the literature in the antebellum United States that so strikingly glorified the home and women's roles in it. But that method would not suffice, since I was interested in women's lives, not just what was written about them. Besides, I inclined to concur with G.R. Taylor that such popularized didactic writings "by and large ... do not bring about changes, though they may hasten and clarify a change which is already in progress. They are only bought because they express something which people, however obscurely, feel. " 2 The literature becomes popular, in other words, because it does not have to persuade-it does not innovate-it addresses readers who are ready for it. It made sense, then, to look at the years before 1830, to find out what had happened that might clarify the reception of or the need for a "cult" of domesticity. I turned to women's personal documents (such as diaries and letters) in preference to published, prescriptive works, in order to 2. Gordon Rattray Taylor, The Angel-Makers: A Study in the Psychological Origins of Historical Change (London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 109.

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3

broaden my inquiry into the relation between change in the material circumstances of women's lives and their outlook on their place as women. Recent historical research which has discovered shifts in family and sexual patterns in the late eighteenth century encouraged me to begin in that period. For the case of the United States-and notably New England-David Hackett Fischer's new work confirms what recent students of historical modernization have been discerning: that the period between 1780 and 1830 was a time of wide- and deep-ranging transformation, including the beginning of rapid intensive economic growth, especially in foreign commerce, agricultural productivity, and the fiscal and banking system; the start of sustained urbanization; demographic transition toward modem fertility patterns; marked change toward social stratification by wealth and growing inequality in the distribution of wealth; rapid pragmatic adaptation in the law; shifts from unitary to pluralistic networks in personal association; unprecedented expansion in primary education; democratization in the political process; invention of a new language of political and social thought; and-not least-with respect to family life, the appearance of "domesticity." 3 3. David Hackett Fischer, "America: A Social History, Vol. I, 1ne Main Lines of the Subject 1650-1975,", unpublished MS draft, 1974, esp. chap. 4, pp. 42-43, chap. 12, pp. 20-22. Some recent writings useful for their treatment of historical modernization and personal relations are Richard D. Brown, "Modernization and the Modern Personality in Early America, 1600-1865: A Sketch of a Synthesis," ]IH 2 (1972):201-28, and Modernization: The Transformation of American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Herman R. Lantz, et al., "Pre-Industrial Patterns in the Colonial Family in America: A Content Analysis of Colonial Magazines," Amer. Sociological Review 33 (1968):413-26; Edward N. Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Daniel S. Smith, "Parental Power and Marriage Patterns-An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts," Journal of Marriage and the Family 35 (1973):419-28; Daniel S. Smith and Michael Hindus, "Premarital Pregnancy in America, 1640-1966: An Overview and Interpretation," JIH 6 (1975):537-71; Robert V. Wells, "Family History and Demographic Transition," ]SH 9 (1975):1-21, and "Quaker Marriage Patterns

4

INTRODUCTION

Such considerations made it all the more important to begin my investigation of women's particular needs and demands, the requirements of them and ideology regarding them, with the late eighteenth century. Historians often compare "colonial women" with "nineteenth-century women" in order to clarify dimensions and directions of change in women's lives in the United States, in work opportunities, family patterns, social status, and ideology. Obviously, this scheme slights the diversity encompassed between 1607 and 1775, and between 1800 and 1900;but if it works at all it must point out that in pace and intensity the change in women's experience (as in other areas), between approximately 1780 and 1830, outran that for considerably more than a century preceding and half a century following. I have seized on the "Revolutionary" in-between period for just such a reason. It also seems to epitomize the prevailing direction of social development. The beginning and end of the period can serve as reference points, clarifying the extent of continuity as well as change. In referring to the early years (the 1780s) I mean also to look back to, and sum up to some extent, what came before; and in referring to later circumstances (the 1830s) I mean to look ahead, to suggest future patterns. My sources begin in the late colonial period but I am aiming at the first recognizably "Victorian" decade. This is an essay in nineteenth-century more than in eighteenth-century history, if such a distinction need be made: my purpose is more to comprebend the shape women's experience was taking than to illuminate what it had been. I have assumed all along that women were neither victims of social change-passive receivers of changing definitions of themselves-nor totally mistresses of their destinies. Women's roles did not develop in a Colonial Perspective," WMQ, 3d ser., 29 (1972):415-42; E.A. Wrigley, "The Process of Modernization and the Industrial Revolution in England," ]IH 3 (1972):225-60.

INTRODUCTION

5

in a unilinear pattern. Social and economic change included alteration of family structure, functions, and values, which affected women's roles in manifold ways. These alterations could be turned to constrain women's autonomy and effect conservative intents, or women could grasp them as cause and opportunity for further change, even for assertion of new social power. It is fitting to begin with the decade of the 1830s in view although it is the end point of this study, for it presents a paradox in the "progress" of women's history in the United States. There surfaced publicly then an argument between two seemingly contradictory visions of women's relation to society: the ideology of domesticity, which gave women a limited and sex-specific role to play, primarily in the home; and feminism, which attempted to remove sex-specific limits on women's opportunities and capacities. Why that coincidence? Objectively, New England women in 1835 endured subordination to men in marriage and society, profound disadvantage in education and in the economy, denial of access to official power in the churches that they populated, and virtual impotence in politics. A married woman had no legal existence apart from her hus. band's: she could not sue, contract, or even execute a will on her own; her person, estate, and wages became her husband's when she took his name. Divorce was possible-and, in the New England states, available to wives on the same terms as husbands-but rare. Women's public life generally was so minimal that if one addressed a mixed audience she was greeted with shock and hostility. No women voted, although all were subject to the laws. Those (unmarried or widowed) who held property had to submit to taxation without representation. This was no harsher subordination than women knew in 1770, but by 1835 it had other grievous aspects. When white manhood suffrage, stripped of property qualifications, be-

6

INTRODUCTION

came the rule, women's political incapacity appeared more conspicuous than it had in the colonial period. As occupations in trade, crafts, and services diversified the agricultural base of New England's economy, and wage earning encroached on family farm production, women's second-class position in the economy was thrown into relief. There was only a limited number of paid occupations generally open to women, in housework, handicrafts and industry, and schoolteaching. Their wages were one-fourth to one-half what men earned in comparable work. The legal handicaps imposed by the marriage contract prevented wives from engaging in business ventures on their own, and the professionalization of law and medicine by means of educational requirements, licensing, and professional societies severely excluded women from those avenues of distinction and, earning power. Because colleges did not admit women, they could not enter any of the learned professions. For them, the Jacksonian rhetoric of opportunity had scant meaning. 4 The 1830s nonetheless became a turning point in women's economic participation, public activities, and social visibility. New textile factories recruited a primarily female labor force, and substantial numbers of young women left home to live and work with peers. In the mid-1830s oc4. For a general r