Nation and Miscegenation: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

MAURI SKINFILL Nation and Miscegenation: Incidents in the Life of a Sfove Girl In fifty-seven years of widowhood, Sarah Josepha Hale never once relinquished the black silk dress of a woman in mourning , a customary resolve which she maintained even at her departure from public life at the age of 91. Hale's retirement address, which like her sable suits announced her allegiance to an ideal of womanly devotion , reiterated an enduring singularity of purpose in its hope that "this work of half a century [would] be blessed to the furtherance of [women 's] happiness and usefulness in their Divinely appointed sphere."1 Until her retirement, the work ofhalf a century Hale alluded to had entailed the dissemination of arguably the single most important code of social relations in the nineteenth century. The cult of domesticity, to which she had given vast currency as the prepossessing editor of Gode^'s Lady's Book, was in part Hale's attempt to recuperate for women the social ballast that had been shifted by the swift expansion of a market economy, an expansion which began to starkly differentiate spheres of life along gender lines. As Ann Douglas has argued, nineteenthcentury middle-class women installed themselves in social positions left vacant by the increasing secularization of American culture, positions which reinforced a gendered cultural divide between sense and sensibility.2 But if that secularization, as Douglas suggests, was a function of Calvinism's doctrinal decline, it was equally a function of the ascending structures ofAmerican capitalism. Excluded from the market as producers, women became relegated to the increasingly static and marginal role of consumers. Yet by sanctifying the home and elevating Arizona Quarterly Volume 52, Number 2, Summer 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 64Mauri Skinfill women to the role of moral caretakers for the nation, Hale carved out a crucial position for women at the ideological center of society.3 Thanks largely to Hale's expository efforts, women became the executors of a crucial myth wherein the family took up an iconic role as the stabilizing force ofsociety. But if, as Barbara Welter has argued, women found a sense of identity in these newly available positions of status, they nonetheless functioned within a traditional system ofgender constraints rather than in opposition to it.4 For as nineteenth-century women exerted their influence as moral caretakers, they acceded to their cultural characterization as servile creatures of sensibility, and American patriarchy thus enforced, in the guise of a concession, women 's still subordinate social roles. Moreover, if Hale's propagation of a cult of domesticity made a virtue of necessity in response to the nineteenth -century market's ineluctable differentiation ofgender roles, her domestic apotheosis served still another conciliatory function, one which directly enabled the development of a market economy in America: for enterprising men born into the constitutional ideal of social parity but confronting the economic stratifications ofan expanding industrialism, the myth of a home distinct from the operations of the cash nexus provided a neat reconciliation of egalitarian virtue with the iniquities of capitalist competition. Or it afforded, at least, a putative division of social and economic spheres which reinforced a democratic ideology even as American ideals of social parity began to conflict with the realities of the market. In providing an ideological haven for the aspiring entrepreneur, Hale's genteel compartmentalization of the market from the home ended by abetting the emergence of the very capitalist ideology whose differentiation of gender roles the cult of domesticity was attempting to ameliorate. The emergence of a domestic ideal out ofthe exigencies ofNorthern industrialism is remarkable not least because it revises an enduring popular conception of the South as the preeminent locus of a domestic ideology which deified white womanhood and its habitation. What Hale's unflagging career attests to is the experience of a Northern society specifically destabilized by the flux of a burgeoning economy and seeking a sanctified sphere separate from the operations of the cash nexus. To be sure the South itselfparticipated in an elaborate mythologization of the home. But the varied sectional applications ofHale's domestic ideology are registered in the distinct relation of the...