Content area
Full Text
Barbara Welter's article, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," arrived in my hands on the headwinds of the feminist seventies. It was in quiet awe, I remember, that I finally shut the covers of her Dimity Convictions. The essays in that volume, mostly published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, literally set the agenda for a whole generation of women's historians.(1) In those years, the ability to tick off the four qualities of true womanhood (PIETY, PURITY, DOMESTICITY, AND SUBMISSIVENESS!) became a password for feminist scholars -- not unlike the Baltimore catechism for Catholics. Now we are sheepishly forced to admit, we made a cult of that cult. And yet Welter's argument is still thriving even thirty-five years after its debut. Historians continue to agree that "true womanhood" was the centerpiece of nineteenth-century female identity (although in Europe, the cult was more likely to go under the name of "real womanhood" or "the domestic ideal"). In addition, cultural historians now draw widely upon the same innovative sources -- magazines, fiction, advice stories -- that Welter mustered up to make her case. But if Welter's article still merits a place in the canon, something else must also be said: inevitably, it has come to trail behind the scholarship it once pioneered. Reading "The Cult of True Womanhood" again has made me aware that indeed the year 1966 was not yesterday, or even the day before.
Among other things, rereading Welter made me appreciate something I had never noticed before: the delicate lacing of sarcasm in her analysis. "It was a fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility" she writes of true womanhood, "which the nineteenth-century woman had -- to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand."(2) In turn, Welter's sardonic tone made me aware of a glaring omission: in the absence of a strong analytic framework, Welter resorts to sarcasm in order to position herself critically in relation to the cult. An example of this lack of analytic muscle comes right at the outset, when Welter tries to understand how the cult of true womanhood "fit" with a bustling new capitalist ethic. "The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads," she begins, again mockingly. In his drive for productivity,...