Cult of Domesticity
Overview
The Cult of Domesticity in the Aftermath of the Industrial Revolution
With the Industrial Revolution emerged new ideas and traditions toward the end of adapting the subordination of women to the new economic developments and technological advances of industrialization; one of those new ideas being the cult of domesticity. This set of conventions in the continuing subordination of women took hold in the industrial societies of the United States and Europe.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
- Compare the new political and labor organizations with governmental responses to worker unrest.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Cult of Domesticity - term for nineteenth-century system of gender subordination imposed on women, mostly in the middle and upper classes, in industrializing nations
The Cult of Domesticity was part of the Separate Spheres ideology which held that men and women operated in separate spheres: women in the home and men outside the women. The Culture of Domesticity (often shortened to Cult of Domesticity or Cult of True Womanhood) is a term used by historians to describe what they consider to have been a prevailing value system among the upper and middle classes during the 19th century in the United States. This value system emphasized new ideas of femininity, the woman's role within the home, and the dynamics of work and family. “True women,” according to this idea, were supposed to possess four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. The idea revolved around the woman being the center of the family, as “the light of the home.”
There are more inclusive representations of domesticity in today's media versus the more limited, heteronormative examples of the past. Domesticity and media have always been interconnected. One of the first films ever shown was a family-centered piece entitled, Le Repas de Bébé or “Baby's Meal.” This 1895 Lumière brothers film depicted a French couple feeding their infant breakfast. Older content including domestic themes, often served to represent white, nuclear, families and female-centered tropes, the “women's weepie” being one common trope, in which mothers sacrificed their own personal identity and wellbeing in order to provide for their children. This is a drastic difference from the current “femme fatale” trope, which demonstrates a rejection of domestic life and family connection in favor of romance, sexuality, danger, and drama.
As part of the cult of domesticity women took on new roles in their families, as being responsible for the home, the children, and their education, within the confines of the continued subordination of women. Accordingly, when they worked, they were employed as maids, cooks, nurses, and teachers. Their behavior in these roles was still defined by four cardinal virtues: piety, purity, submission, and domesticity. Peity in this context referred to a woman’s religious faith, as opposed to a man’s intellectual capabilities. Purity referred to virginity. Submission meant that a wife should obey her husband—and other male superiors, and domesticity referred to a woman’s roles in the home. As part of this ideology women were seen as being competent within the home, but not so much outside of the home.
Practically, the conventions of the cult of domesticity could only be followed by middle- and upper-class families. Most working class and lower middle-class families needed the income from both the fathers and the mothers, along with many of the children. Middle-class women who took on allowed occupational roles, such as nurse or teacher, were still held to the domestic idea of gender. Working class women, however, were not held to these conventions as much because of the prevailing social prejudices that treated them as unequal to their upper-class counterparts, and instead often as objects to use.
Influence on the West of the Cult of Domesticity
The Cult of Domesticity influenced the participation of women in the labor market during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For instance, it affected married women's labor market participation in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. “True Women” were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labor and refrain from paid, market-oriented work. Consequently, in 1890, 4.5% of all married women were “gainfully employed,” compared with 40.5% of single women. Women's complete financial dependence upon their husbands proved disastrous, however, when wives lost their husbands through death or desertion and were forced to fend for themselves and their children. Additionally, this division between the domestic and public spheres had effects on women's power and status. In society as a whole, particularly in political and economic arenas, women's power declined. Within the home, however, they gained symbolic power.
Learning Objectives
- Analyze the human and environmental consequences of Industrialization and the factory system in England.
- Identify, explain, and assess the historic significance and impact of the new developments and trends in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution.
- Compare the new political and labor organizations with governmental responses to worker unrest.
Key Terms / Key Concepts
Cult of Domesticity - term for nineteenth-century system of gender subordination imposed on women, mostly in the middle and upper classes, in industrializing nations
The legal implications of this ideology included the passage of protective labor laws, which also limited women's employment opportunities outside the home. These laws, as well as subsequent U.S. Supreme Court rulings, such as Muller v. Oregon, were based on the assumption that women's primary role was that of mother and wife, and that women's non-domestic work should not interfere with their primary function. As a result, women's working hours were limited and night work for women was prohibited, essentially costing many female workers their jobs and excluding them from many occupations.
The Cult of Domesticity “privatized” women's options for work, for education, for voicing opinions, or for supporting reform. Arguments of significant biological differences between the sexes (and often of female inferiority) led to pronouncements that women were incapable of effectively participating in the realms of politics, commerce, or public service. Women were seen as better suited to parenting. Also, because of the expected behaviors, women were assumed to make better teachers of younger children.
One of the first public jobs for women was teaching. Catharine Beecher, who proselytized about the importance of education and parenting, once said, “Woman's great mission is to train immature, weak, and ignorant creatures [children] to obey the laws of God...first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world....” One estimate says that, with the growth of public education in the northern tier of states, one-quarter of all native-born Massachusetts women, in the years between 1825 and 1860, were schoolteachers at some point in their lives.
Connection to Women’s Rights Movements
Women's rights advocates of the late 18th and early 19th centuries—such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau in Britain—were widely accused of disrupting the natural order of things and condemned as unfeminine. “They are only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites,” wrote Henry F. Harrington in the Ladies' Companion. However, after the Jacksonian era (1812 to 1850) saw the expansion of voting rights to virtually all white males in the United States, many women believed it was their opportunity for increased civil liberties.
Early feminist opposition to many of the values promoted by the Cult of Domesticity (especially concerning women's suffrage, political activism, and legal independence) culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. This convention was the first national effort in the U.S. and one of the early national efforts in the West to contest the discrimination that underlay the Cult of Domesticity. The slow progress that women have had to endure in their efforts to end gender discrimination and repudiate the Cult of Domesticity since the Industrial Revolution illustrate the resilience of both.
Attributions
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"Social Change"
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