In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Women's History 14.1 (2002) 150-155



[Access article in PDF]

True Womanhood Revisited

Mary Louise Roberts


Barbara Welter's article, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," arrived in my hands on the headwinds of the feminist seventies. It was in quiet awe, I remember, that I finally shut the covers of her Dimity Convictions. The essays in that volume, mostly published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, literally set the agenda for a whole generation of women's historians. 1 In those years, the ability to tick off the four qualities of true womanhood (PIETY, PURITY, DOMESTICITY, AND SUBMISSIVENESS!) became a password for feminist scholars—not unlike the Baltimore catechism for Catholics. Now we are sheepishly forced to admit, we made a cult of that cult. And yet Welter's argument is still thriving even thirty-five years after its debut. Historians continue to agree that "true womanhood" was the centerpiece of nineteenth-century female identity (although in Europe, the cult was more likely to go under the name of "real womanhood" or "the domestic ideal"). In addition, cultural historians now draw widely upon the same innovative sources—magazines, fiction, advice stories—that Welter mustered up to make her case. But if Welter's article still merits a place in the canon, something else must also be said: inevitably, it has come to trail behind the scholarship it once pioneered. Reading "The Cult of True Womanhood" again has made me aware that indeed the year 1966 was not yesterday, or even the day before.

Among other things, rereading Welter made me appreciate something I had never noticed before: the delicate lacing of sarcasm in her analysis. "It was a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility" she writes of true womanhood, "which the nineteenth-century woman had—to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand." 2 In turn, Welter's sardonic tone made me aware of a glaring omission: in the absence of a strong analytic framework, Welter resorts to sarcasm in order to position herself critically in relation to the cult. An example of this lack of analytic muscle comes right at the outset, when Welter tries to understand how the cult of true womanhood "fit" with a bustling new capitalist ethic. "The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads," she begins, again mockingly. In his drive for productivity, she continues, he ignored the religious values of his forebears, and was racked with guilt at having transformed the fatherland "into one vast counting house." But, Welter argues, true womanhood allowed our American man to "salve his conscience" by providing a reassuring model of permanence: "one thing at least remained the same—a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found." 3 [End Page 150]

Welter sensed that true womanhood served some useful role in capitalist culture, but was only able to link it to the notoriously hyper-active Puritan superego. She failed to understand the cult as an ideology that performed political and cultural "work." Thanks to such scholars as Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and Mary Poovey, we better appreciate now how the domestic ideal helped consolidate European capitalist power. In Poovey's words, by "linking morality to a figure (rhetorically) immune to the self-interest and competition integral to economic success," the cult "preserved virtue without inhibiting productivity." 4 Today, we know a great deal more about how the cult of true womanhood structured the worlds of private and public, the home and the workplace, the family and the professions; how it helped to maintain class- and race-based hierarchies of power; and how it justified women's exclusion from participatory democracy. 5 The very success of Welter's model meant that her work would rapidly become preliminary.

Welter's clumsy attempts to analyze the politics of true womanhood also made me realize how much discourse analysis has sharpened the focus of feminist history. The article was written in 1966, almost two decades before the tidal wave of Foucauldian analysis hit scholarly shores. Welter described the absence of piety in...

pdf

Share