The Cult of Domesticity
Lesson 22
From U.S. HISTORY, BOOK 1: America--Creating the Dream, Beginnings to 1865
© The Center for Learning.
Objective
- To understand how women responded to their changing roles in the early nineteenth century
Notes to the Teacher
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century families were primarily economic units in which men and women developed partnerships centered in the home. In the early nineteenth century, industrialization gave rise to a new urban middle class and took men involved in commerce and industry away from the home for their work. This separation of the home and family from the workplace led to a redefinition of the home as primarily the woman's sphere. Traditional woman's work, such as cooking, cleaning, and raising children, was now separated from the outside world of work and money. Contemporary authors, writing of man's sphere and woman's sphere, redefined the ideal woman in a way that devalued woman's work and created a prescriptive woman's role. Victorian, middle-class women now sought fulfillment through self-sacrifice. Today, historians call this role of women the "cult of domesticity."
During the 1830s, Angelina and Sarah Grimke began to challenge this narrow definition through their participation in the antislavery movement. Because they traveled, spoke in public, and lectured to crowds of both men and women, they were accused of leaving their appointed sphere, defying the laws of God, and endangering the family. Most women did not agree with the Grimke sisters. Catharine Beecher, for instance, argued women should influence society but only through their domestic sphere. Eventually the "woman question" led to a split in the antislavery movement and the beginning of the nineteenth-century women's rights movement.
In this lesson, students distinguish traditional male and female qualities. They show how "feminine" qualities helped women to fulfill their responsibilities as defined by the "cult of domesticity." Statements from early debates concerning the proper role of women help students understand why the cult of domesticity continues to define women's role and makes equality an unrealized goal even today.
Procedure
1. Ask students to define division of labor. Discuss the traditional division of labor in the American family. Recite the bit of doggerel:
A man works from sun to sun,
But a woman's work is never done.
Discuss its meaning, and indicate that dissatisfaction with the division of labor by gender is a long-standing point of dispute. Use the Notes to the Teacher to provide a frame of reference for the lesson.
2. Distribute Handout 22, and have each student categorize by gender the qualities in Part A, Number 1. Review their answers to this question before discussing the rest of Part A.
Suggested Responses to Part A: Number 1
Feminine qualities/characteristics include delicate, self-sacrifice, devotion, housework, private, sentiment, passive, innocent, moral center, modest, dependent, emotional, spiritual, weak, submissive, inferior Male qualities/characteristics include tough, personal success, ambition, "real" work, public, logic, active, worldly, provider, assertive, independent, reasonable, material, strong, dominant, superior
3. Continue Part A through class discussion.
Suggested responses: Part A, Numbers 2-4
(2-3) Answers will vary.
(4) Men saw home as a retreat from the harshness and cornpetitiveness of the public sphere.
3. Read the quotations in Part B aloud, and discuss the answers as a group activity.
Suggested responses: Part B
(1) All people should share the same human rights.
(2) Women should accept their traditional role but should become the moral center of the nation as well.
(3) Catharine Beecher accepted the inferior status of women and their "separate sphere."
(4) Angelina Grimke would be more of a feminist; she would use the vote--
and officeholding as well--to improve the home and the world for her
family. She would not accept inequality of women.
(5) Answers will vary.
(6) Answers will vary.
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