The “Cult of True Womanhood”

THE “CULT OF TRUE WOMANHOOD”

INTRODUCTION

When I first started researching the history of the Deserted Village of Feltville, it seemed a simple case of setting out events and activities as they took place at the Village itself. In the decades during which I have continued my research my historical research has repeatedly taken its own direction, as I find that my study of something or someone related to the village launches me into some fascinating aspect of history about which I want to know more.

So it is with this post. I started out to profile some of the women I associate with the Village’s resort period—its days as Glenside Park. As I looked to understand the nineteenth century context in which those women moved and acted, my research got both intensely personal and particularly humbling.

It is humbling, first, to try to adequately understand and convey in one short post even some of the historic currents and trends which might have impacted women associated with Glenside Park. It is humbling to see (and find time to read) whole books written on one small aspect of what women were doing in the nineteenth century. It is humbling because the nineteenth century is just that—a century, and one can expect things to have changed from the beginning of the century to the end. It is humbling because every one of the women I am associating with Glenside Park was an individual, not just a product of her time. In studying the trends and currents previously identified by other historians and later, measuring my characters against them, there is a danger of finding only what I expect to find and missing something important.

It is personal for some of the same reasons. Clearly, attitudes and trends did change for women from the beginning of the century to the end. But, as a feminist myself at Princeton University in the early 1970s and as a civil rights lawyer afterwards, I faced a persistence of some of the same viewpoints about women. As I read one article which put dollar values on the housework done by nineteenth century women, I remembered our own struggle to value the invisible work of the home—still continuing into the present.

For all the hazards and the benefits, I am writing this post, which is a look into some attitudes, currents and trends which might have impacted the women I will study. This will necessarily be only a small start—remember those authors and the books on some seemingly small aspect, after all! Indeed, I will rely on previous authors, identifying and utilizing their views of what influenced nineteenth century women.

Briefly then, I will expand on the following: during the nineteenth century, the United States saw the Industrial Revolution transform the way Americans got their household goods. Along the way, men became wage earners, more than producers of agricultural products or craftwork. Women also stopped producing goods in the home, either for themselves or to sell. Gender roles changed or solidified with the changed activities of both men and women, creating what has been called the “Cult of True Womanhood” or “Cult of Domesticity.” Those changes continue to have effects down through the twentieth century and into the present.

THE CULT OF TRUE WOMANHOOD

The study of gender roles in nineteenth century New Jersey and the United States necessarily takes place within the then-prevailing legal principle of coverture, inherited from English common law. Under this principle, upon marriage, a woman lost her rights to own property or enter into contracts and became totally dependent on her husband.¹ In last month’s post, I mentioned the legal protections which had arisen to protect widows from individuals who would seek to use coverture to deprive them of any part of their late husband’s estate. These protections, called dower rights, entitled a widow to one third of the usage, income and enjoyment of her dead husband’s real property. This did not give the widow any outright ownership rights, however. You may recall that Warren Ackerman gave his wife ownership rights to all his real property during her life in lieu of dower rights, protecting her, perhaps from the multitude of his heirs.

As the industrial revolution took more and more people away from rural areas where men and women were both producing goods at home, whether for themselves or for sale, the middle class began to expand, and societal changes developed which would persist through the century. In her 1969 article “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson.” Gerda Lerner indicates that this period, the early nineteenth century was a period of transition from the colonial and early republic era, bringing increasing industrialization and a concomitant growth of cities. As men took their families into more urban areas to pursue middle class jobs.² Catherine Lavender has identified middle class jobs as including lawyer, office worker, factory manager, merchants, doctors.³ In her book Home and Work, Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic, Jeanne Boydston notes that the new definition of manhood became the ability to earn wages from the growing array of middle class jobs, an ability often threatened by the “unstable economic conditions” of the time.⁴ The standard of manhood included bringing in enough income to assure that the woman could remain at home, but could care for the home and children, performing work which became increasingly invisible to society and unpaid. Since neither husband nor wife was producing goods at home, at least in the ideal middle class family, space was freed up for “the multiplication of parlors, bedrooms, and other purely domestic spaces, even in smaller houses inherited from the eighteenth century.”⁵ Whenever possible, the middle class man would seek to have a new house built, with more of these class conscious spaces.

 

 

American society responded by making gender roles firmer and more distinct. For women, there arose “The Cult of True Womanhood,” which was apparently first identified by Barbara Welter, in her 1966 article, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.”⁶ This has also been called the “Cult of Domesticity.” Clearly, no one of the time would have called it a cult, so that is a title created by Welter looking back on the nineteenth century. However, Welter found substantial evidence of the phrase and ideal of “true womanhood” being increasingly promoted, starting in the early nineteenth century, as the model for women’s behavior, particularly for the expanding middle class. Welter based her conclusion on a survey of “almost all of the women’s magazines published for more than three years during the period 1820-1860 and a sampling of those published for less than three years; all the gift books cited in Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and gift Books, 1825-1865 (New York, 1936) . . . hundreds of religious tracts and sermons . . . and [a] large collection of nineteenth century cookbooks.” Welter found corroborative evidence in a variety of women’s personal writings, including diaries and letters, and in novels by women which sold over 75,000 copies during the period.

Welter summarizes the “cult” in dramatic terms:

The Nineteenth-Century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forebears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s magazines, gift annuals and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman wherever she was found.⁷

Historians have identified four-character traits possessed by the “True Woman:” piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness. Piety was necessarily religious, and, as noted, allowed men to be assured someone was keeping an eye on religious precepts, even as men were out laboring in a “real world” of work which drew them away from such values. Purity was sexual, with the true woman saving her virginity for her husband and using her sexual virtue to keep her man from straying afterwards, while she, herself, made sure to fend off any untoward advances from other men. A true woman chose her clothing carefully, so as not to be too provocative; Lavender indicates that the norm which required legs to be covered was often extended to a practice of covering legs of pieces of furniture with fabric, lest one be reminded of naked female legs by naked chair legs.⁸

Submissiveness meant that a woman gave up any ambition other than to nurture her husband’s career—but not to give advice unless asked, and to be “ever timid, doubtful, and clingingly dependent; a perpetual childhood.”⁹

Last was domesticity, which involved particularly housework and childcare—all from the safety and quiet of the home, a true woman’s appropriate sphere. Women could calm and care for her husband, coming home weary from his duties providing income for the family. From home she could take care of sick family members, and bring all the family members the right moral values. Freed from some labor by servants (see below), she could do needlework and mending.

Boydston argues that the cementing of gender roles can be seen as an ironic response to industrialization and the changes that brought to the United States:

Particularly in the antebellum Northeast, the ideology of gender spheres was partly a response to the chaos of a changing society—an intellectually and emotionally comforting way of setting limits to the uncertainties of early industrialization. Historian Ann Douglas, who has been among the chief proponents of this view, has argued that the sentimentalization of the home and of womanhood allowed the white, Protestant, upper middle class to resolve profound contradictions in its own behavior—to seem to cherish the very values its own activities so clearly denied.¹⁰

Thus, by assigning piety to women, men were left free to embrace the cutthroat life of the marketplace outside the home, secure in the knowledge that they would come back to the gentle influence of their godly wives.

SERVANTS AND CHANGING TECHNOLOGY CHANGE THE NATURE OF HOUSEWORK

But housework too was rapidly changing. The money which the middle class men earned bought bigger homes in urbanizing areas, and also the ability to buy their wives the rapidly changing panoply of technological advances, including the iron stove, the sewing machine, and other labor saving homemaking devices.

The women in these homes were no longer spinning and weaving their own cloth or growing their own food but going out to purchase items at the rapidly increasing array of stores. In her article “American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture,” Kathy L. Peiss identifies “modern American consumer culture” as having arisen after 1890.¹¹ Women were explicitly identified as being the primary consumers, and targeted with advertisements and new ladies magazines—what Peiss calls the big six: Ladies Home Journal, McCall’s, Delineator, Woman’s Home Companion, Pictorial Review, and Good Housekeeping. Shopping became both a duty for women, and at the same time, a means of achieving respectability—having the right products in the home, wearing the right clothing, shopping the safe and convenient groupings of stores such as the famous “Ladies Mile” in New York City, where a woman could be safely seen and admired and of course, shop.

In New Jersey, in 1892, Caroline Bamberger and her brother Louis Bamberger, along with Louis Frank and Felix Fuld, converted an existing building in the first Bamberger’s department store in Newark.¹² Hahne’s, another department store, was built in Newark in 1901, and attracted out of town women, who could come to Newark by train. These were among the most successful of the New Jersey department stores, but most major cities of the state had department stores by the 1890s.¹³

Peiss cites Edward Bok, editor of Ladies Home Journal as expressly linking shopping to womanly duties and respectability—making it clear that some form of “the cult of true womanhood” which has arisen earlier in the century was still alive and well through the Glenside Park period. Peiss notes that simultaneously with such exhortations there were those who increasingly questioned the stereotypes of womanhood tied up with the idea of the female consumer. For an example, Peiss cites “feminist Frances Maule” who laughed at “the good old conventional angel-idiot conception of women”—i.e. the ideal of the “True Woman”—and argued that this did not reflect women’s real lives.¹⁴

The multiplicity of women’s magazines and guides of the nineteenth century, whether Godey’s and those current with it through the mid to late nineteenth century, or the big six and others which arose in the late nineteenth century, gave women at home instructions on use of new technology, fashion, and cooking. But the middle-class women being sent home to be true women increasingly, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and to at least some extent through the end of the century, had the aid of servants. The Irish immigration, which I have described in a previous post, and which peaked in the mid-nineteenth century supplied the middle-class homes with servants like the newly emigrated Annie Hoyne (later Molloy) and her mother Mary Hoyne. Increasingly, the middle-class men’s wages were providing his wife with the assistance of these servants, which was a badge of respectable middle-class status, the manhood of the providing husband and the true womanhood of the wife.

As I have described in my previous post, New Jerseyans, along with many “native born” Americans of the nineteenth century at once vilified and exploited the Irish, finding their religious beliefs and practices questionable, but relying on them particularly for household labor. In her book, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, Revised Edition. Catherine Clinton notes that Protestant mothers feared having their children exposed to the “evils” of Catholicism, yet most household workers were Irish.¹⁵

While the true woman was relieved of some household labor, now undertaken by servants, she took on a new role, as the one who supervised those servants, taking on a new role. And even as she retreated to a more private sphere in her middle-class home, she faced the loss of privacy that full-time servants might bring.

In a short article by Erin Blakemore called “How America Tried (and Failed) to Solve its ’Servant Problem,’” the author details how the middle class practice of having at least one servant began to die out in the early to mid-twentieth century because of the increasing difficulty of finding servants.¹⁶

One last note: at the same time that the early nineteenth century saw the expansion of the middle class, supported by wage earning or entrepreneurial men, it also saw the rise of the mill girls—women heading out from home to earn wages at the mills growing out of the industrial revolution. These women tended to be young single women; married women often found it harder to obtain a mill job.¹⁷ Indeed, the famous Lowell mills and the Lowell mill girls often produced the cotton fabric which was replacing the home made fabric of the colonial era. In New Jersey, cotton mills were established in Paterson as early as the 1820s. Middle class women may have seen the hiring of servants as a way of distinguishing themselves in class status from the working women at the mills.¹⁸

THE OTHER CIVIL WAR

Women of the early American republic did not fail to notice that women were entirely left out of the Constitution, while other marginalized groups, African Americans, and Native Americans were specifically mentioned—and excluded from the rights extended to white male Americans.¹⁹ In her book, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, Catherine Clinton characterizes the creation of the Cult of True Womanhood, with its accompanying “redefinition of the home as women’s domain [as] a delicate process designed to channel women’s contributions into a proper course.”²⁰ This was a recognition that women needed an outlet for their energies. As noted, women were increasingly characterized as and channeled into being consumers, which, of course, gave women the activity of shopping to consume their time, should the care of the husband and children and the supervision of servants not prove sufficient. In part by leveraging the educational duties that childcare necessarily included, women found ways to increase access to educational opportunities, for themselves and their daughters.

Thus, women seeking to expand educational opportunities—which many women saw as a privilege of citizenship in the new republic—leveraged the notion of “Republican Motherhood,” which was, in a sense a corollary of the Cult of True Womanhood. If, indeed, motherhood were the ultimate calling for every true woman, the mothers, the first educators of the next generation in the new republic, needed to be adequately educated to fulfill this role. New Jersey began to see educational institutions which were either coeducational, or, more frequently, female only.

In New Jersey, one of my past posts has described how Frederic Augustus Adams, Ella King Adams’ father-in-law, led a girls’ school in East Orange called the Brick Church Young Ladies’ Seminary starting in the 1840s, which ran for more than a decade before ceasing operation.  https://feltvillefeatures.com/introducing-ella/.

In 1887, Evelyn College in Princeton became the first female college in the state.²¹ Evelyn College lasted only ten years, closing in 1897, but in 1899, the Catholic Order, the Sisters of Charity, opened the College of St. Elizabeth.²² Douglass College, a women’s college affiliated with Rutgers College, was opened in 1918.²³

But, across the country, women were not only simply teaching their own children at home. By 1870, more than half of the 200,000 primary school teachers across the country were women.²⁴ Most women teachers were single women, expecting to leave formal teaching upon marriage.

The number of female schoolteachers was viewed as dangerous by some men, who, by the turn of the twentieth century had launched “a full-scale campaign” against this perceived predominance of women as schoolteachers.²⁵

Clinton notes that those fighting for increased educational opportunities for women and girls consciously avoided linking their campaign to the growing movement for women’s suffrage, recognizing that a too early emphasis on achieving suffrage could have doomed their efforts.²⁶ Simply tying education to their womanly roles and divorcing it from suffrage campaigns or women’s rights campaigns in general could avoid resistance to expanded education for women.

DIFFERENT FORMS OF FEMINISM?

But even an expanded access to education could not keep women content to stay home being true women. Indeed, Clinton suggests that the increased leisure provided from going from being a household producer of clothing and food to a supervisor of domestic workers, provided them with time to consider what other activities they wanted to undertake and what rights they deserved. Some women, married or single, clearly pursued the vote, which Clinton suggests was the focus of many feminists because they believed with the vote they could get together to vote for the reforms they sought.²⁷ But, as previously noted, women suffered from a dearth of many other rights beyond the vote—including the right for married women to own property.

One of the foremost examples of an individual actively campaigning for greater rights for woman comes in the person of Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book for forty years. In her book, Lady Editor, A Biography: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Making of the Modern American Woman, Melanie Kirpatrick calls her the “unsung prophet of women’s march toward equality.” ²⁸

As noted above, there was an explosion of published material to help guide the nineteenth century woman in her quest for true womanhood. Clinton indicates there were more than one hundred “ladies” magazines, and that the most successful was Godey’s Lady’s Book. Kirkpatrick sees Hale as a champion women’s rights, even though she accepted that men and women should have separate spheres and opposed the campaign for suffrage.

Hale’s particular women’s right campaigns focused around education and employment opportunities for women, and had grown out of her own life experiences. Hale, widowed when pregnant with her fifth child, was able to support herself and her children through her writing and editing career. For the rest of her life, she remained ardent about the need for women to be able to similarly support herself if necessary, and her magazine included a monthly “Employment for Women” column. She was an early and consistent supporter of education for girls and women and used her position as editor of the most popular women’s magazine to include articles demonstrating the intellectual equality of women, their rights to education and to be able to find work which would support themselves, as she had.

At the same time, she presaged the feminist movement in which I found myself as a college student in her emphasis on the underappreciated nature of the work done invisibly by women at home. Kirkpatrick notes that she coined the term “domestic science” for housework, which helps make visible the effort involved in keeping a home.

WOMEN’S ORGANIZATIONS

Women found other ways of channeling their energies outside of the home, without running afoul of the stereotype of the “True Woman,” increasingly creating or joining networks and organizations. Some of these were religious, through whatever church a woman might be part of. Some were focused first on abolition and then other reforms and led by men. For some women, these were the training ground for suffrage or other organizations pursuing women’s rights.²⁹ I will not be spending time in this post on suffrage activities nationally, or in New Jersey, since none of the women I intend to profile seem to have been engaged in these campaigns.

But a whole host of organizations—women’s clubs—which dovetailed, at least on their face, with the sphere to which women had been relegated, sprang up or grew more prominent. Women had already started some “women’s clubs” prior to the Civil War, but their number and membership exploded in the last half of the nineteenth century, especially in urban centers—along with a move towards an orientation Clinton characterizes as intellectual and/or feminist, although not necessarily overtly the latter.³⁰ Some clubs thrived on exclusivity. Some organizations championed rights for working women or the poor—”benevolence.”

One of the first of the new crop of organizations was called Sorosis and was formed in 1868 in New York City, as a result of newspaper writer Jennie June Croly being excluded from a dinner given by the Press Club of New York in honor of Charles Dickens. Simultaneously, and at first unaware of the founding of Sorosis, Bostonians Mary Livermore, Julia Ward Howe and others organized a women’s club in their own city, incidentally, allowing men to be associate members. These two organizations together are described in A History of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs: 1894-1958:

These women all realized that as individuals they could not expect recognition but that united they could demand and receive consideration. The two organizations became the nucleus of the Woman’s Club Movement.³¹

Sorosis held a national convention in 1889, and again in 1890, invited clubs then in existence to a meeting whose purpose was to create a permanent national organization. Sixty-one delegates convened to form the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, with Mrs. Charlotte Emerson Brown of Orange, New Jersey selected as the Federation’s first president.³²

Brown had been one of the founders of New Jersey’s first women’s club, the Women’s Club of Orange, started in 1871.³³ New Jersey organized its own New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1894 with a roster of 36 existing New Jersey clubs and joined the national General Federation in that same year.³⁴ In A History of the New Jersey State Federation of Women’s Clubs: 1894-1958, the authors laud “the many types of service [which have] brought the Federation distinction, and also celebrate “the hundreds of generous New Jersey women [who] have contributed their time and talents to a varied program designed to promote higher social and moral condition through study and united action.”³⁵

In Past and Promise: Lives of New Jersey Women, an unidentified suffrage advocate is quoted as saying: “New Jersey has so many associations of women that they have acted as a bar against the formation of suffrage clubs, women feeling that they had already too many meetings to attend.”³⁶ Clinton notes that although the women’s clubs “branched out into civic activity, not merely token activity, but deep commitment to reform,” they deemed pursuance of suffrage too controversial.³⁷

In her book Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19^th Century United States Lori D. Ginzberg explores the nineteenth century history of women and this civic activity or service, under the rubric of “benevolence.” ³⁸ Ginzberg says that the idea of benevolence as pursued by American women changed over the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on “moral regeneration” before the Civil War, and later in the century, to a “responsibility to control the poor and vagrant.”³⁹

Interestingly, Ginzberg raises the question whether the very fact of women’s being relegated to a separate sphere may have led to bonds between women, especially in women’s organizations, and their “radicalization,” in some sense.⁴⁰ She also notes that benevolence had an essentially class nature and that “women’s class and social backgrounds corresponded with the causes they were likely to enter.”⁴¹ Moreover, there was an evolution of the “business of benevolence,” which allowed women to be employed by the social institutions they created, while still being “True Women.”

There were also women’s organizations created around reading or education, which often featured talks or readings. These included the “Daughters of Aesthetics” founded in the late 1870s in Jersey City and the Kalmia Club of Lambertville, founded as a reading club in 1892.⁴²

WOMEN’S RIGHT TO VOTE IN NEW JERSEY

While I will not be discussing the suffrage movement, it should be noted that New Jersey has the distinction of being one of the few states to have extended the vote to women—and to blacks—prior to the national amendments granting those rights. New Jersey also has the distinction of having taken the vote away.

New Jersey’s original state constitution, adopted July 2, 1776, upon its declaration of the end of British colonial law, included a provision extending the right to vote in state elections to “all inhabitants of the colony of full age, who are worth fifty pounds proclamation money.”⁴³ Karnoutsos says that this was not meant to make women legally equal to men, and indeed, precluded the vote for married women, since the doctrine of coverture transferred any property a woman had to her husband upon her marriage. Single women and widows were permitted to vote in local and at least some state elections for some years. In 1800, legislators refused to pass an amendment which would allow qualified women to vote in congressional races.

Women’s right to vote was rescinded in November 1807, when women were blamed for a much wider amount of cheating—by both women and men—in a local election earlier that year. Karnoutsos indicates that the legislature avoided the bigger issues of voter eligibility checks that the election raised in favor of disenfranchising women, blacks and foreigners.⁴⁴

John T. Cunningham has the most colorful description of what led the New Jersey State Legislature to revoke women’s right to vote, which I include, in the hopes that you will find it as amusing as I did.

Cunningham describes voting which was to take place over three days in February 1807, which would allow voters in Elizabethtown and Newark, New Jersey to choose the site of a new courthouse. Apparently, Elizabethtown and Newark voters were given separate days on which to register their votes. Elizabethtown’s voters had already voted, with much evidence of cheating, when:

Newark’s turn to register a choice came on the third day. Polls opened at 1 A.M., with people already standing in the darkness waiting to vote. They voted throughout the night and the next day, earnestly—and often.

Women then enjoyed the right to vote in New Jersey, but “enjoyed” is a limited word to describe their enthusiasm in Newark. Eyewitnesses told of women casting ballots as often as six times in various disguises. Men and boys dressed in women’s clothing passed unchallenged at the polls.

When the long day came to an end, mobs thronged Broad Street to hear the results. . . . Since Newark had the greater number of mischief makers it won the court house, 7,666 to 6,181. . . .

The scandal had important repercussions. The State Legislature indignantly took away woman suffrage at the next election (and included foreigners and Negroes in the ban for good measure). The denial of the vote to Negroes ironically followed closely on an 1804 law providing for the gradual abolition of slavery in New Jersey.⁴⁵

“THE UNQUIET SEX”

Women were finally granted the vote in 1920. But, before that time, it was beginning to be clear that while the notion of separate gender roles was still in place, women were increasingly chafing at restrictions on all aspects of their lives. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who, during her life was one of the popular of all American writers, but is today virtually unknown expresses this in a quote in The Work Ethic in Industrial America 1850-1920 by Daniel T. Rodgers:

Beneath jeweled corsages beat restless hearts, from under the flower laden brims of modish hats look unhappy eyes, gazing out into the world with longing for an indefinable something.⁴⁶

I was particularly pleased to find this quote since I intend to profile Wilcox, who was one of Glenside Park’s summer guests, in a future post. In that post, I will discuss the way in which writing, was a shakily acceptable occupation for a woman, generally a single or widowed woman, as demonstrated by the success of Sarah Josepha Hale, mentioned in this post. But, as with Hale, the works produced were often aimed at promoting, at least to some degree, the pursuance of “True Womanhood” and domesticity to readers. I have a whole book to read about nineteenth century women writers before I can explore that in detail, so stay tuned.

NEXT MONTH

Next month, some of the women! How do they demonstrate and diverge from the trends and currents I have just begun to explore here?

Until then.