Using the readings for Module 4, assess the ideals and realities of the “cult of domesticity.”
(You will find them in the first file, “Markets, Religion, and Reform”).
In her now-classic article on “The Cult of True Womanhood,” historian Barbara Welter wrote concerning antebellum women that
“The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors, and her society could be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity… Without them…. all was ashes. With them she was promised happiness and power.”
That is, she was supposed to be religious, remain virginal until marriage, then be submissive to her husband, and above all, to be domestic, to devote herself to home and hearth, husband and children. This ideology of “separate spheres” for men and women meant that men’s sphere would be the public sphere of politics, business, and labor, while “women’s sphere” would be “private and domestic.”
In your paper, analyze and critique the ideals and realities of this “cult of domesticity.”
(I don’t expect you to utilize all of them, but address some of them in formulating your thesis statement). Keep in mind that the idea of women as domestic was, at the time, an innovation — a colonial woman would not have understood the idea because the home was a workplace. “Work” as a place to which one goes, as well as labor, arose only with industrialization. Some things to think about as you read the primary sources: ideas about the supposed inferiority of women that were prevalent at the time, how not all women had access to the secure, stable homes presupposed by the ideal, how it might both constrained women and fostered communities of women (and some of these became active in the abolitionist movement, which was radical at the time, and in women’s rights).
Remember, there are no “right” or “wrong” responses.
A note about sources historians use:
There are three types of historical sources:
1. primary sources, documents from the period we are studying (for example, a primary source about the Salem witch trials could be a trial transcript)
2. secondary sources, scholarly articles or books about the topic we are studying
3. tertiary sources like textbooks and encyclopedia articles.
However, sometimes we can treat a scholarly secondary source as a primary source — and this is useful in the case of Welter’s article. Consider that it was published in 1966, before the fields of women’s history/ studies and African American history/ studies had developed, and it may be understandable how for “woman” she means “white, middle class woman” without mentioning the experiences of African American women (both free and enslaved), immigrant women, and working-class women.