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Activities: Context Activities The Radical in the Kitchen: Women, Domesticity, and Social Reform  Back to Context Activities
The lives of most middle-class white women in nineteenth-century America were structured by an ideology known as the "Cult of Domesticity," or the "Cult of True Womanhood." This influential ideal of femininity stressed the importance of motherhood, homemaking, piety, and purity. While men were expected to work and act in the public realm of business and politics, women were to remain in the private, domestic sphere of the home. Charged with making the home a peaceful refuge of harmony and order--a haven from the stress of the competitive economic activity of the public domain--women were encouraged to eschew an interest in business or politics and devote themselves instead to the details of housekeeping and motherhood. Writers like Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Lydia Maria Child published manuals offering exhaustive guidelines on the proper maintenance of the American home, instructing their readers in everything from the appropriate dimensions of furniture to the correct way to launder dish towels. Fastidious housekeeping was not simply a display of cleanliness or good taste; rather, a well-managed home was believed to foster good morals and Christian behavior in the people who resided within it. In tending their houses, then, women were understood to be tending the nation's morals. Nineteenth-century proponents of the Cult of True Womanhood believed that women possessed an inherent, natural capacity for sympathy, piety, and purity that made them uniquely fit to manage the domestic sphere. While this domestic ideology might seem restrictive or even degrading by today's standards, it can also be understood as a method through which women asserted power in antebellum America. Rather than seeing their role as peripheral or trivial, some nineteenth-century women viewed their homemaking and child-rearing as almost revolutionary cultural work--they believed it would bring about the foundation of a new, harmonious, Christian society. In this light, it is telling that Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe prefaced their manual, The American Woman's Home (1869), "To the Women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the republic." As critic Jane Tompkins points out, domestic ideology had far-reaching implications in its efforts to "relocate the center of power in American life, placing it not in the government, nor in the courts of law, nor in the factories, nor in the marketplace, but in the kitchen. And that means that the new society will not be controlled by men, but by women." This "culture of the kitchen" was a powerful force in antebellum America, saturating popular magazines, advice books, religious journals, newspapers, and sentimental literature. Domestic ideology, with its insistence on Christian morals and the redemptive power of love, was often aligned with social reform movements aimed at saving or rehabilitating the downtrodden and oppressed. Penal reform, poverty relief, women's suffrage, and especially abolitionism were popular outlets for middle-class women's sympathy and energy. Viewing the buying and selling of children and adults as an outrageous affront to the sanctity of family relationships, proponents of domesticity designated slavery a kind of national domestic problem for white American women to manage and settle. Domestic objects such as aprons and pinholders printed with pictures of suffering slaves functioned to remind women of the brutality of slavery as they performed their domestic work, and thus aligned that work with sympathy for slaves. Gillian Brown has noted that slavery was particularly horrifying for proponents of domesticity because it "disregards the opposition between the family at home and the exterior workplace. The distinction between work and family is eradicated in the slave, for whom there is no separation between economic and private status." As Harriet Jacobs makes clear in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, enslaved women could not live according to the ideology of "True Womanhood" because they could never be legally secure in marriage, motherhood, or home. Forced to labor for their white owners, they could not create private households of their own. Valued as chattel, they could be sold and separated from their children, husbands, and homes, as the advertisements from slave auctions featured in the archive make vividly clear. Even the stereotypical figure of the African American "Mammy," an icon of nurturing motherhood and domesticity, could never really be part of the "Cult of Domesticity" because her work was forced rather than freely given and performed for her owners rather than for her family. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is a clear example of domestic fiction: it uses the ideology of domesticity to mobilize a searing and powerful attack on slavery. By focusing on the slave system's destruction of families--both black and white--Stowe was able to portray slavery as a threat to the sanctity of the American home. Stowe's novel found its power in emotionally charged images of motherhood: an early and often cited episode portrays Eliza Harris, her child in her arms, desperately running across ice floes on the Ohio River to prevent her son from being sold away from her. Stowe's investment in the ideology of domesticity can be indexed by her reliance on descriptions of kitchens as a means to characterize the relative virtues of particular households in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In the St. Clair plantation, for example, the slave cook Dinah runs a disorganized and inefficient kitchen which "looked as if it had been arranged by a hurricane blowing through it." According to Stowe's logic, this badly managed kitchen is a direct reflection of the disorder and destructiveness caused by the slave system. Conversely, Rachel Halliday, the kindly Quaker woman who assists Eliza in her escape from slavery, keeps a perfectly ordered, welcoming kitchen in which every item of food seems imbued with a spirit of "motherliness and full-heartedness." Rachel's kitchen functions as the moral center of Stowe's book, its harmony and warmth a perfect manifestation of maternal love and Christian salvation. If Uncle Tom's Cabin works by appealing to women's capacity to "feel" and sympathize, it also depends on depicting African Americans as possessing the same qualities of sentimentality and docility that were supposed to characterize the domestic woman. Thus, we learn that Uncle Tom has the "gentle, domestic heart" that "has been a peculiar characteristic of his unhappy race," and Stowe declares that African Americans "are not naturally daring and enterprising, but home-loving and affectionate." In her attempts to align the plight of black slaves with the concerns of middle-class white women, then, Stowe ends up perpetuating racist and sexist stereotypes. These problems certainly make the book less appealing to contemporary readers, but Stowe's sentimentality--however essentializing and racist--was a powerful political strategy in its own time. So successful was Uncle Tom's Cabin that Helen Hunt Jackson adopted the same formula over three decades later. Consciously modeling Ramona after Stowe's novel, Jackson hoped to unleash the same kind of moral outrage and social protest against the enslavement of Native Americans in California. Questions
[2498] Currier & Ives, The Age of Brass, or The Triumphs of Women's Rights (1869), courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC2-1921]. This depiction of women suffragettes voting shows a woman in pantaloons holding a sign reading, "Vote for the Celebrated Man Tamer" and another woman scolding a man holding a baby. With its reversal of public/private roles, this scene reverses the "Cult of True Womanhood" ideal. [5313] Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kitchen Design in the American Woman's Home: Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (1869). This illustration shows the Beecher sisters' interpretation of an efficient kitchen layout. Books and manuals on middle-class women's roles in managing households were widely popular amid the Victorian era's new technologies and economic relations. [5476] Anonymous, Cover illustration for Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery by Mrs. L. M. Child (1838), courtesy of the Library of Congress, African American Pamphlet Collection. A white female figure of Justice reaches down to uplift a supplicating enchained black female slave. The image affirms both common humanity and unequal status among women. [6833] E. E. Hundley, W. Robinson, and H. M. Robinson, Slave Auction Broadside Advertisement, Arkansas (1842), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division [rbpe 00103300]. In this advertisement for an auction of enslaved men, women, and children, along with animals and tools, men are described by their age and women by their skills, attractiveness, and childbearing capacity. |
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