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Sentimental Womanhood and Domestic Education, 1830–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Phillida Bunkle
Phillida Bunkle*
Affiliation:
The History Department of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
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Extract

A SEXUAL IDEOLOGY with profoundly antifeminist implications developed in the northern United States during the forty years after 1830. This middle class ideal of sentimental womanhood, defining women as spiritual, emotional, and dependent, has received less attention than the ideology of the small minority of feminists and reformers who rejected a passive stereotype of women in their search for autonomy. Yet the antifeminist system of belief dominated the perception of women in the nineteenth century. It provided women with supreme domestic powers through religious influence and the education of children, though it exacted a price of powerlessness beyond these spheres. How was it that this sentimental ideal had such pervasive influence? The most common answer is that it was the result of economic change.

Type
Articles
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 1974 , pp. 13 - 30
Copyright
Copyright © 1973 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Butler, Charles, The American Lady (Philadelphia, 1841), p. 22.Google Scholar

2. The most influential formal accounts of this theory, which has been widely assimilated by popular and academic commentators are by Talcott Parsons, especially, “The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States,” in Essays in Sociological Theory (Glencoe, Ill., 1954).Google Scholar

3. British historians have stressed class rather than function in economic explanations of the rise of genteel conventions. Explanations of the role of women have however rested upon psychological premises such as the need for conspicuous consumption with upward mobility. See for example, A. J. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

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29. There are no good published accounts of Mrs. Hale. By far the best biography I have found is Nancy Osterud's unpublished 1971 Radcliffe honors thesis, “Sarah Josepha Hale,” in the Schlesinger Library. The thesis is an excellent statement of the argument for the economic determination of sex roles.Google Scholar

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33. Hale, , p. xxv.Google Scholar

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37. Ibid. p. xxiii.Google Scholar

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39. This is the central point in Gail Parker's article “Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood,” New England Quarterly v. 53 (March 1970): 3–18. I am indebted to her for much of my information on Mrs. Eddy. Additional information on Mrs. Eddy is taken from Podmore, Frank, Mesmerism and Christian Science: A Short History of Mental Healing, (London, 1909), p. 218–300, and also Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary (Cambridge, 1971), v. I, p. 55–561.Google Scholar

40. For example the Dictionary of Notable American Women lists Mrs. Hale and Mrs. Phelps as “feminists,” and Eleanor Flexner in Century of Struggle: The Women's Rights Movement in the United States (New York, 1970) treats Mrs. Hale and Miss Beecher as pro-feminists.Google Scholar

41. Stanton, , et al., The History of Woman Suffrage v. I, p. 512.Google Scholar

42. Thomas, , Seminary Millitant, p. 80.Google Scholar

43. A critical account of this decision is given in Duniway, Abigail Scott, Path Breaking: An Autobiographical History of the Equal Suffrage Movement in Pacific Coast States (New York, 1971), p. 187–208.Google Scholar