Women's History in the New Millennium: A Retrospective Analysis of Barbara Welter's "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860"

There may be no more frequently cited article than Barbara Welter's analysis of ideals for white middle-class northern urban American women in the early nineteenth century. Welter's exploration of prescriptive literature has since prompted considerations of the impact of the expectations of "True Womanhood" on other groups of women, and the concept of a societal ideal propagated at the very time that conditions for women were undergoing change has had resonance beyond the field of U.S. women's history.

Often criticized (unfairly, I would argue) for focusing on an ideal accessible to relatively few women, Welter's article deserves a fresh read. I think too often we forget the context of 1966, the year that it was published. We asked a group of scholars working in different fields of women's history to reflect on this classic article. Mary Louise Roberts, from the perspective of European women's history, reminds us of how much theoretical approaches developed since 1966 have added to our understanding of the kind of discourses Welter analyzed. Nancy Hewitt, whose own work both grew out of the questions Welter raised and has also contributed to our understanding of diversity among women, points out how much more sophisticated and complex the article is than the token description it often warrants. From an interdisciplinary perspective, Tracy Fessenden focuses on deconstructing not only the category "woman" in the Cult of True Womanhood but also the category "religion." And, finally, Donna Guy considers the relevance of the concept of True Womanhood for Latin American women's history, emphasizing the differences between the United States and societies lacking a large and strong middle class.

Together, these essays remind us how far we have come, but also how remarkable was the work of early women's historians like Barbara Welter.———Leila J. Rupp