I need help for my Literature assignments
tn2019
CultofTrueWomanhood.ppt“Cult of True Womanhood”
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“True Womanhood”
- PUBLIC SPHERE vs. PRIVATE SPHERE
- 1820s-1880s
- Powerful ideology perpetuated through print culture, religion, public and private discourses
- IDEOLOGY—never complete actuality
- Class- and race-based
- Ultimate goals: marriage and motherhood
- Barbara Welter, American Quarterly 18 (1966): 151-174.
Four Key Virtues: Religious Piety
- Women naturally religious
- Too much reading/education undermines piety
- Woman’s job: raise children to be good Christians
- Keep husband on straight and narrow so that he will be effective leader in public sphere
Four Key Virtues: Moral Purity
- Maintain chastity against wilder passions of men
- Lose chastity—lose status as a true woman
- Irony: preserve virginity at all costs until marriage—but marriage is key to all happiness
- Image: Mid nineteenth-century prostitutes, New York City
Four Key Virtues: Submissiveness
- Women the passive responders to husband/brothers/father
- Rebel against men = rebel against God
- Suppress own talents and voice to men’s
- Image: “A Reading Party,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, 1846.
Four Key Virtues: Domesticity
- HOME ideal place—man’s haven from contaminants of public sphere
- Home is where the heart is (sentimentality, sympathy, emotion, femaleness)
- Public sphere is where head is (intellect, reason, maleness)
- Housework, needlework as morally uplifting
1848 Seneca Falls Convention
- Arguably first mass meeting for women’s rights in America
- Backlash: Poem “What are the Rights of Women”
“The right to love whom others scorn,
The right to comfort and to mourn,
The right to shed new joy on earth,
The right to feel the soul’s high worth.
Such women’s rights, and God will bless
And crown their champions with success.”
