“Woman’s Place” and the Search for Identity in Ante-Bellum America

TheCanadian Review of American Studies, Volume IO, No. 3, Winter 1979 "Woman's Place"andthe Searchfor Identity in Ante-BellumAmerica Jean V. Matthews This paper is intended as a tentative exploration of some ways in which the particular intellectual and cultural climate of ante-bellum America affectedboth the adjustment of middle-class men and women to one another andthe development of a more acute self-consciousness among women about theiridentity and their role in society. The process of modernization gathermg momentum in eighteenth-century America and Western Europe contributed two important aspects to that mental climate: first, a "republican " ideology which, not in spite of, but because of its commitment to liberty and equality made it extremely difficult to know exactly what to do with human beings perceived as ineradicably and by nature "Other" and unequal-women (and in the United States, blacks); second, an acute awareness of, and anxiety about, sexual identity as something, apparently, no longer to be taken for granted, but needing constant definition and confirmation. From the l 820's a third development impinged upon these anxieties: an intense preoccupation, fostered both by Romanticism and the Revival, with the Self, with self-examination, self-development, the expansion of individual potentialities towards a constantly receding horizon ofhuman "growth." Finally, what Page Smith calls the "Protestant passion" to turn the energies of the redeemed and newly-aware self onto the social redemption of the world issued in a great wave of reform. All of these factors had a profound effect on the ways in which men and women 290 Jean V.Matthews conceived their relationships to one another. All, in tum, were themselves bound up with problems of sexual tensions and sexual definition. 1 The late eighteenth century faced the intellectual problem of how to reconcile a political and economic world coming to be conceived as a contractual association of free, equal and independent individuals, with the family, perceived as necessarily an association of the unequal and the dependent. A republican order, far more than other forms of political association, seemed to depend for its integrity on the exclusion of women. The rhetoric of the American revolution is full of the association of republi~ canism with masculinity and virility, while courts and monarchy frequently equate with femininity and effeminacy. "Cultivation of the female mind isnot of great importance in a republic," wrote Lord Karnes in 1778,"where men pass little of their time with women." Certainly, European travellers in the young republic seldom failed to notice the extreme separation of men and women and what appeared to be the almost monastic seclusion of respectable married women. 2 The celebrated doctrine of the separate spheres of men and women, with its accompanying cult of domesticity and insistence upon the total exclusion of women from public life was in one sense a means of preserving the republic in vigor by protecting it from the corrupting influence of women. Proponents of this sexual apartheit spoke of it not so much as rooted in nature and tradition, but as a developing concomitant of the growth of civilization and moral improvement. To "Christianity alone," declared a clerical commentator on the position of women in 1822, fell the honor of marking "with precision, the official boundaries between the two great divisions of mankind." Fifty years later Catharine Beecher concurred : "The more society has advanced in civilization and in Christian culture, the more perfectly have these distinctive divisions of responsiblity for the two sexes been maintained." 3 Yet the American home was not a harem; hardly anyone, by the early nineteenth century, was prepared to tell the American woman that her sole function in life was to minister to the private desires and comfort of her lord and that her sphere, so carefully separated from public life, had no function, however indirect, to play in the destiny of the republic. All masculine defenders of the doctrine of separate spheres were prepared to attest to the incalculable influence of a good woman-its incalculability only to be exceeded by its imperceptibility ; the latter, all agreed to be the essential quality of female influence. The solution, as Linda Kerber in particular has shown, was to relink woman...