Taking the True Woman Hostage

In the late 1980s and 1990s, there was Joan Scott's "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis" and Elsa Barkley Brown's "Womanist Consciousness"; before that, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg's "The Female World of Love and Ritual"; and in the beginning, Barbara Welter's "The Cult of True Womanhood." ¹ These articles were quoted, cited, paraphrased, summarized, and critiqued with such regularity that their titles became stock phrases in feminist scholarship. Gradually, they began to be used without quotation marks, then without citation, and increasingly without any reference to the original articles. This has been especially true of the cult of true womanhood, a phrase often used as though the concept offered a transparent window into nineteenth-century (white, urban, middle-class) women's experience.

Despite scholars' efforts to treat the idea critically, generations of undergraduate students simply memorized the mantra—piety, purity, domesticity, submissiveness. Textbook authors incorporated the term into gender-sensitive treatments of antebellum American society. Although many linked the ideal's construction to larger economic and political changes, the dominant image remains that of a middle-class housewife happily trading in agricultural labor alongside men for the joys of urban domesticity and childrearing. Meanwhile, graduate students, who chafe at the naive assumption that any ideal could capture the diverse histories of American women, often lump the cult of true womanhood into that single paragraph recounting the bad old days when the lives of white northern ladies formed the centerpiece of women's history. Through all these processes, differences among white women have been submerged, the economic and social upheavals that marked the early to mid-nineteenth century have been muted, and, perhaps most significantly, the treacherous dynamics of "true womanhood" that Welter so clearly illuminated have been obscured.

It was the coercive aspects of this nineteenth-century "feminine mystique" that drove Welter's analysis. ² I was introduced to the cult's constraints and to American women's history more generally by Barbara Welter herself. She taught for one semester at the University of Pennsylvania when I was a first-year graduate student there. Only later did I realize how generous she was in agreeing, as a visiting professor, to direct my independent research project. It was under her guidance that I tested my first (unsuccessful) dissertation topic—an analysis of Emma Goldman's contributions to second-wave feminist thought. Fortunately, Welter taught me about the equally fascinating world of antebellum women's activism, which ultimately became the focus of my work. She helped me frame one of the key questions for my dissertation: how was it that white, middle-class, antebellum women, who most fully imbibed the cult of true womanhood, also launched a series of social movements, including campaigns against slavery and for woman's rights? The answer seemed to lie in the contradictory impulses—between order and change, progress and stability, materialism and religiosity—that the ideal sought to resolve.

Welter made clear in the opening paragraph of her article the power relations that inhered in the cult's construction: "The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forebears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one vast countinghouse. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood . . . was the hostage in the home." ³ The ideals Welter uncovered in her analysis of nineteenth-century prescriptive literature, novels, diaries, and correspondence did not simply codify modern notions of women's place. Rather, in response to dramatic economic and political upheavals, they constructed white, middle-class "true women" as the gladiators at the gate...