Page 308 - American Stories, A History of the United States

Domesticity and Changes 12.1

in the American Family

12.2
12.2 What was the doctrine of “separate spheres,” and how did it change family life?
T he evangelical culture of the 1820s and 1830s influenced the family as an 12.3

institution and inspired new conceptions of its role in American soci-
ety. Women—regarded as particularly susceptible to religious and moral
influences—were increasingly confined to the domestic circle, but they became
more important within it. Many parents viewed rearing children as essential prepara-
tion for a self-disciplined Christian life, and they did it with serious self-consciousness.

The Cult of Domesticity

The notion that women belonged in the home while the public sphere belonged to men
has been called the ideology of “separate spheres.” In particular, the view that women
had a special role to play in the domestic sphere as guardians of virtue and spiritual
heads of the home has been described as the Cult of Domesticity, or the “Cult of True Cult of Domesticity Term used to
Womanhood.” For most men, a woman’s place was in the home and on a pedestal. The characterize the dominant gender
ideal wife and mother was “an angel in the house,” a model of piety and virtue who role for white women in the
exerted a wholesome moral and religious influence over men and children. An 1846 antebellum period. it stressed the
virtue of women as guardians of
poem expressed a masculine view of the true woman: the home, which was considered
I would have her as pure as the snow on the mount— their proper sphere.
As true as the smile that to infancy’s given—
As pure as the wave of the crystalline fount,
Yet as warm in the heart as the sunlight of heaven.

The sociological reality behind the Cult of True Womanhood was a growing divi-
sion between the working lives of middle-class men and women. In the eighteenth
century and earlier, most economic activity had been centered in and near the home,
and husbands and wives often worked together in a common enterprise. By the mid-
nineteenth century, however, this way of life was declining, especially in the Northeast.
In towns and cities, factories and counting-houses severed the home from the work-
place. Men went forth every morning to their places of labor, leaving their wives at
home to tend the house and the children. Married women were increasingly deprived
of a productive economic role. The cult of domesticity made a virtue of the fact that
men were solely responsible for running the world and building the economy.
A new conception of gender roles justified and glorified this pattern. The doctrine
of “separate spheres”—set forth in novels, advice literature, and the new women’s
magazines—sentimentalized the woman who kept a spotless house, nurtured her chil-
dren, and offered her husband a refuge from the heartless world of commerce and
industry. From a modern point of view, it is easy to condemn the Cult of Domesticity
as a rationalization for male dominance, and it largely was. Yet confinement to the
home did not necessarily imply that women were inferior. By the standards of evangeli-
cal culture, women in the domestic sphere could be viewed as superior to men, since
women could cultivate the “feminine” virtues of love and self-sacrifice and thus act as
official guardians of religious and moral values.
Furthermore, many women used domestic ideology to fashion a role for them-
selves in the public sphere. The evangelical movement encouraged women’s roles as
the keepers of moral virtue. The revivals not only gave women a role in converting men
but endowed Christ with stereotypical feminine characteristics. A nurturing, loving,
merciful savior, mediating between a stern father and his erring children, provided the
model for woman’s new role as spiritual head of the home. Membership in evangelical
church associations prepared women for new roles as civilizers of men and guardians
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