The Cult of Domesticity or Cult of True Womanhood[a] was a prevailing value system among the upper and middle classes during the nineteenth century in the United States[1] and Great Britain. Although all women were supposed to emulate this ideal of womanhood, it was assumed that only white women could live up to the ideal.[2][3] Similarly, working class women who had to leave the domestic sphere to pursue paid employment, were regarded as unfeminine.[4]
According to the ideals of the cult of domesticity, women were supposed to embody perfect virtue in all senses. The women who abided by and promoted these standards were generally literate and lived in the Northeastern United States, particularly New York and Massachusetts. Women were put in the center of the domestic sphere and were expected to fulfill the roles of a calm and nurturing mother, a loving and faithful wife, and a passive, delicate, and virtuous creature. These women were also expected to be pious and religious, teaching those around them by their Christian beliefs, and expected to unfailingly inspire and support their husbands.
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According to historian Barbara Welter, author of the influential essay on this topic, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860", True Women were to hold the four cardinal virtues:[6]
The characteristics of a "true woman" were described in sermons and religious texts as well as women's magazines.[7] In the United States, Peterson's magazine and Godey's Lady's Book were the most widely circulated women's magazines[5] and were popular among both women and men.[8] Magazines which promoted the values of the Cult of Domesticity faired better financially than competing magazines which offered a more progressive view in terms of women's roles.[5] With a circulation of 150,000 by 1860,[9] Godey's strove to spread the ideals of True Womanhood.[5] The magazine's paintings and pictures illustrated the four virtues, often showing women with children or behind husbands. It also equated womanhood with motherhood and being a wife, declaring that the "perfection of womanhood (...) is the wife and mother".[10][11] The magazine presented motherhood as a woman's natural and most satisfying role, and encouraged women to find their fulfillment and their contributions to society strictly within the home.[12] Reflecting the ideal of True Womanhood, Godey's considered mothers as crucial in preserving the memory of the American Revolution and in securing its legacy by raising the next generation of citizens.[13] Fashion was also stressed because a woman had to stay up to date in order to please her husband. Instructions for seamstresses were often included.
Part of the Separate Spheres ideology, the Cult of Domesticity identified the home as women's "proper sphere" whereas the public arena was regarded as men's proper place.[14] The Cult of Domesticity affected married women's labor market participation in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.[15] True Women were supposed 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 when wives lost their husbands through death or desertion and were forced to fend for themselves and their children.[16] The division between the domestic and public spheres had an impact 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.[17]
Women were seen as better suited to parenting. Catharine Beecher, a headmistress who proselytised about the importance of education and parenting, once said, "Woman's greatest mission is 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." Also, because of the expected behaviors woman were assumed to make better teachers and thus one of the first out of home jobs for women was teaching. One estimate says that one quarter of all native-born New England women in the years between 1825 and 1860 were schoolteachers at some point in their lives. Peoples of the nineteenth century, both men and women, did not consider what women did as wives and mothers as work but as an effortless expression of their feminine natures.
Women who advocated for women's rights such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau were 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.[18] During the Progressive Era,[19] the New Woman emerged as a response to the Cult of True Womanhood.[20] The New Woman, frequently associated with the suffrage movement,[21] represented an ideal of femininity which was diametrically opposed to the values of the Cult of True Womanhood.[22]
After the rise of feminism and the fight for women's rights, the cult of domesticity arose again in the 1950s when television began to present shows that depicted fictional families where the mother would stay at home with the children while the man went to work. The Cult of Domesticity shaped an idealized myth of the family and paved the way for the nuclear family.[23]
After the Jacksonian Period, 1812 to 1850, had granted universal white male suffrage, extending the right to vote to virtually all white males in America, women believed it was their opportunity for civil liberty. However, even after the Declaration of Sentiments was written at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the right to vote was not extended to women until 1920.