Cultural Messages Clash with the Spirit of Independence
These contrasting themes of mutuality and conflict must be understood in the context of economic and cultural forces that were shaping antebellum New England. Industrial development, urbanization, and western expansion fundamentally reordered American society in the postcolonial period. Each of these three developments caused massive shifts in population, as marginal farm workers sought jobs in newly established shoe or textile factories, moved to the city to learn a trade, or migrated west to homestead cheap land or pan for gold. Industrialization in particular had a tremendous impact on the organization of social and economic life. It moved production out of the household, creating a separation between "home life" and "work life." Throughout the nineteenth century, however, a majority of Americans lived in rural areas, and it was not uncommon for men and women to go back and forth between factory and farm employment or between city and country. On the farm, the proto-industrial economy organized a division of labor and social life different from that of the city, even after industrialization and commercial agriculture entered the countryside. Furthermore, while engaged in various "employments; working women and men had little conception of a lifelong career. With the industrial organization of textile production, workers moved between farm and factory; and to the extent possible, they manipulated their work experience within the factory to suit their needs and habits.[19]
In villages and small towns, people largely knew one another, and business transactions intermingled with community ones. Conversely, while on social visits, men and women often exchanged labor, helping with domestic chores or farm labor. The daily close contact made anonymity impossible and seemed to grant a license to the community to judge informally the behavior of its members. In rural areas, many women became "hired girls" on neighboring farms, entered the developing network of textile factories in the New England hinterland, or contracted piecework in the "outwork" system, binding shoes, sewing buttons on cards, or making straw hats. As many as one in four women taught school at some point in her life. Still other women, bound to the farm and responsible for household chores, produced and sold dairy
products. While men had more employment options out of the home and exercised greater geographical mobility, we know little about what work they did in the home. The assumption of historians—based on accessible evidence—has been that men had little to do with the domestic sphere and its activities. In essence, they have been viewed as primarily public beings, shaped by the instrumentalism of economic exchange and formal political bargaining.[20]
The rise of industrial textile production in New England threatened to undo local mechanisms of social control, particularly over young women. The new organization of work granted women temporary economic independence and unprecedented freedom from family and community surveillance (see Figure 2). In the industrializing towns, such as Lowell, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire, textile manufacturers attempted to replicate mechanisms for social control in response to the threat of social disorganization. In larger cities such as Lynn, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire, these controls were less effective but nonetheless continued to operate through kin networks, friendship and neighborhood circles, and religious organizations. In the cities, when men left the home to work in industry, commerce, and government, some women stayed at home to care for children and attend to family needs exclusively, while other urban women attempted to stave off poverty by joining the ranks of domestic servants or workers in the needle trades.[21]
Legally, white men had the power to vote, own property, and hold public office. Black men in the North could vote in some states if they owned property. However, after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, free blacks were in effect denied citizenship, and they did "not fail to recognize that they had no reasonable protection under the Constitution." Neither black nor white women could vote or hold political office; in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, women were "civilly dead." Married women could not own property and had no right to the wages they earned until the Married Women's Property Acts were passed in the 1840s and 1850s. Economically, white men controlled nearly all of the country's wealth, earned more than twice the wages of working women, and dominated skilled positions in the labor market.[22]
Middle-Class Ideology and Separate Spheres
The 1820s and 1830s gave birth to a new dictum regarding the place of middle-class white women that dovetailed neatly with the separation of
work from family life, and public from private space. The shift of production of household goods from home to factory meant that women's work at home, textile manufacturing in particular, was being usurped by industry. What were women to do? The advice literature encouraged wives and mothers to focus their energies on caring for their families and uplifting the morals of society. Women were to guard their sphere and rightful place—the home—with all the virtues imbued in a proper wife-mother: "piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity." Cultural arbiters such as ministers and advice writers propagated this "cult of true womanhood," in what began as simple advice to uncertain readers and culminated decades later in a crusade to save the older social order from change.[23]
The middle-class male companions to true women were to be "the movers, the doers, the actors," those who provided for and protected the family. By 1852 The Ladies Counsellor had delineated this "beau ideal": a man who was energetic, self-denying, benevolent, cultivated, economical, and religious. In his study of self-made men, Ronald Byars describes the fashionable middle-class man as someone who exhibited ambition, courage, and strength, and was "almost ascetically devoted to the work-related virtues." Male virtue required concerted effort because the new man was vulnerable to the lure of vice and evil, particularly under the influence of corrupt women. E. Anthony Rotundo points to the critical transition from youth to manhood that involved a strong commitment to a career, marriage, and a house of one's own: "The identity of a middle-class man was founded on independent action, cool detachment, and sober responsibility." The home, according to the advice manuals studied by Byars, was "an appendage to a man's life. It had sentimental significance, but was not a major factor in his life. It did not contribute much to his sense of personal identity," Rotundo finds middle-class men even fearful of the "cage of domesticity" that women represented, prompting some men to reject those aspects of life that held feminine associations—religion, culture, the home, and women themselves.[24] Men, as breadwinners, theoretically had the public world to themselves and reigned over the household only as distant patriarchs.
This ideology of the cult of true womanhood fit neatly with the developing separation of work and family life. Gerda Lerner draws our attention to the cult's attempt to construct a mythic past with a "natural" gendered order by making "claims to tradition, universality, and a history dating back to antiquity, or at least to the Mayflower." But instead of resurrecting a perfect order, in her view, the cult constricted
work opportunities for women and diminished their social status: "It is no accident that the slogan 'woman's place is in the home' took on a certain aggressiveness and shrillness at the time when increasing numbers of poorer women left their homes to become factory workers." The ideology had a clear class message: impoverished domesticity was preferable to an unwomanly economic independence outside the home.[25]
Concomitant with the growing separation of work and family, the cult of true womanhood developed a companion ideology of gendered spheres. Beginning in the 1820s, a body of advice literature developed that addressed concerns of domestic life. It advocated construction of a metaphorical wall between public and private life in middle-class families and, in effect, recommended a new gendered division of labor. It relegated women to domestic life and men to the marketplace and world of politics. The advice literature admonished women not to leave the safety of the home—"the empire of Mother"—to enter into the dangerous outside world. Women's place was by the hearth fires, tending the education of their children, guarding the morals of society, and mitigating the ill effects of calculating, harsh market relations. In essence, women's confinement to the home was to be rewarded with security and power, or at least influence, in the domestic sphere. Men, as providers, theoretically had the public world to themselves and reigned over the household only as distant patriarchs. In part, this advice literature attempted to address the tension created by the separation of work from family life. It posited gendered spheres of influence in which the sphere of instrumental rationality is countered by the realm of intimacy and emotion.[26]
Scholars of women's history and the sociology of gender have attempted to explain the status of women in society by using a corresponding theory, originating in the nineteenth century, that divides society into male and female realms of influence and power. One school of thought claims that the division of labor into paid production and unpaid reproduction created physically, emotionally, and culturally separate spheres of influence and activity for men and women. Some historians, drawing largely from research on the middle class, retrospectively interpret the divide as absolute. For example, Karen Halttunen writes, "By definition the domestic sphere was closed off, hermetically sealed from the poisonous air of the world outside."[27] While subjecting the paradigm to scrutiny, much influential feminist research has accepted the assumption that a separate sphere encouraged a distinct women's culture to flourish.[28]
Contemporary scholars who criticize the notion of separate spheres as a central nineteenth-century cultural practice do so for three reasons. First, recent scholarship that investigates the practices of rural communities has raised significant questions about the degree to which men and women absolutely cordoned off their lives from each other. In addition to evidence of strictly gender-specific realms of labor and influence, historian Nancy Grey Osterud finds extensive mingling of men and women—economically, socially, and emotionally—in rural upstate New York. Men were routinely involved in household chores, women labored in the fields, and they socialized side by side: "The degree to which they shared farm and household labor was exceeded only by the commonality of their social activities." Women constructed female networks of support, but they did not necessarily prefer them to relationships with men; "rather," Osterud concludes, men and women "strove to create mutuality in their marriages, reciprocity in their performance of labor, and integration in their patterns of sociability."[29]
Second, even for white antebellum middle-class women, the ideological and practical divisions between the sexes were less extreme than domestic ideology purported. C. Dallett Hemphill's recent reassessment of the period's conduct literature suggests that in focusing only on women, the nineteenth-century historiography conducted in the 1960s and 1970s missed the symmetry between cultural portraits of men's and women's roles. In the realm of behavior, Ryan finds that women's labors in the home contributed to the local economy, and significant numbers of women found gainful employment outside of the household. In addition, women actively joined churches, voluntary associations, and charitable organizations. These studies call into question the legitimacy of the separate-spheres framework for conceptualizing the experience even of middle-class women.[30]
Third, some feminists have more recently argued that "the metaphor of separate spheres has been stretched too far." Linda Kerber suggests that it is best understood as a means to enforce cultural norms for women. Similarly, Nancy Cott finds that separate spheres remain useful "only in reference to ideology." Kerber and Cott assert that separate spheres can only be used in specific, restricted ways.[31]
Although I agree that a concept of separate spheres is a useful tool for analyzing ideology, I also challenge the class-based assumptions that inform the separate-spheres perspective. The evidence in this book reveals a practice of gender mixing in social situations, not the extreme separation of men and women that was culturally prescribed. Nonethe-
less, a deeply gendered division of labor underlay their practice. To the degree that manufacturing moved into factories, the separation between work and the household profoundly transformed production and social relations. The gendered division of labor in the home and in the workforce therefore remains at the center of my structural framework.
Women's Conceptions of Self and Work
Given the pervasiveness of these cultural messages, one question inevitably emerges: How did they actually affect people's attitudes and behavior? While the ideology of domesticity and true womanhood found a resonant audience within a segment of the urban white middle class, the extent to which it affected others—poor, working-class, black, or rural peoples—remains a disputed question. What did ordinary working people think of these ideas?[32]
For economic, cultural, and geographic reasons, the cult of true womanhood failed to influence many women. Literary historian Hazel Carby points to the dialectical relationship between standards of white womanhood and black female sexuality which helped to specify the essence of the true woman in the nineteenth century. She writes that black womanhood existed outside these newly constructed standards, beyond boundaries defined by a distorted image of black female sexuality: "The contradictions at a material and ideological level can clearly be seen in the dichotomy between repressed and overt representations of sexuality and in the simultaneous existence of two definitions of motherhood: the glorified and the breeden" African American autobiographies and other literature demonstrate that in the antebellum period and after, black women constructed their own ideal of black womanhood. Their ideal included an ability to make a living, cleverness, tenacity, and a strong commitment to the family.[33]
The messages about "ladies" also created dissonance in the minds of young white farm girls, many of whom worked in the first textile factories in New England. Neither farm girls nor factory girls could fulfill the prescriptions of the cult of true womanhood. As Lerner points out, in northern white society, which was presumed to be egalitarian, "the cult of the lady . . . serve[d] as a means of preserving class distinctions." The cult of true womanhood notwithstanding, it was the young women of New England, not their farming fathers, who left the household for factory work. Many others earned income through the puttingout system, by weaving palm-leaf hats, sewing shirt collars, doing leather
piecework, and covering cloth buttons. Within this system, some women actively pursued the goals of middle-class domesticity. Others, recognizing the profound "limitations and the possibilities of their situation," collectively rejected new cultural demands and constructed an ideal woman in their own image.[34]
Millgirls consciously countered dominant images of the "true woman" by "extolling the virtues of wage-earning women." Judged unfeminine by a newer, more exacting standard, millgirls constructed a countervailing definition that included the virtues of self-improvement, intelligence, spiritedness, financial independence, and productivity. Adaline Shaw, working at a mill in Providence, Rhode Island, attempted to dissuade her father from calling her home to Bangor, Maine:
When you ask me to leave my work, and return to Maine you ask me to make myself unhappy indeed; for I think that I can never again be contented there. We have been earning but a very little ever since we came from home till we came here, and now we are doing quite well, and I do not wish to leave so soon. I do not know as I am in the habit of disobeying you, but dear father, if you knew my feelings you could not, would not blame me.
While I know that I am supporting myself independent of the assistance of my friends, I feel much happier than to be dependent upon them for every cent that I have. Besides, I think that I am as well able to maintain myself as they are to do it. You think that I had better leave the factory and work at my trade in that it would be more for my health. But I must be allowed to differ from you in that respect. I know by experience that it is very injurious to my health to confine myself to sewing. I am confident that the exercise of a factory life is much more conducive to health and truely I like it far better. I do not know why it is that our friends have such an aversion to a factory. Is it wholly because it tends to injure health ? . . . Or is it because they consider it disgraceful? If I never bring any more disgrace upon our family than that, I think that I shall be entirely free from that charge. A factory life is not looked upon in such light here. I cannot think that it is any disparagement to a girl to get an honest living. Do you think it is?[35]
Through the vehicle of The Lowell Offering , a newspaper printed by mill operatives in cooperation with mill owners, millgirls put forth an alternative vision of an American factory worker that incorporated a new female ideal: an upstanding, moral, literate, white woman who aspired to improve herself through education and spiritual growth. Thus one Lowell millgirl published a poem called "A Cultivated Intellect Superior to Beauty." As the conditions of work in the mills harshened and wages dropped in the 1830s and 1840s, millgirls created a less
sanitized version of the factory worker. A more militant picture emerged, developed in their independent newspaper, The Voice of Industry , which recognized the plight of women workers as an exploited group and focused on the oppression of workers and the profits of the mill owners. This more contentious self-portrait clashed strikingly with that of the middle-class true woman.[36]
Similarly, in another female-dominated and poorly paid occupation, schoolteachers shaped an image that contradicted the ideal of the female teacher promoted by education reformers of the 1830s and 1840s. Consonant with true womanhood, the reformers' ideal teacher nurtured students, drew on her womanly skills, and "mothered" the children as only a woman could. But the teachers, most of whom were young and single, and who received wages comparable to those of textile workers—worse, actually, since teaching work was seasonal—often found the factory a work environment superior to the disorderly and demanding classroom. Female teachers pursued intellectual self-improvement and prioritized their search for good wages. Unlike other female workers, such as seamstresses and domestic servants, teachers and mill operatives had the opportunity to define their womanhood in concert with one another through their writings, meetings, and publications.[37]
Although many of the working women in my study did not have the same collective opportunities, they too expressed objections to the middle-class conception of true womanhood. Sarah Trask, a Beverly, Massachusetts, shoebinder and the diarist in my research most drawn to domesticity, believed that a wife must think for herself. Of a neighbor, the bride of a drunkard, Sarah wrote: "I pity her. Yet, I don't know as she needs my pity, for she knew what he was before she married him. Why did she not have a mind of her own? " Martha Barrett, while selectively seizing upon cultural messages with which to judge herself, took pride in her strength of character, her active brain, her industrious work habits, her tenacity, her sound judgment, and her reason, which rose above the influence of romance and love. But she did struggle with cultural messages. When attempting to contact her deceased friends at a séance, she reprimanded herself for being unable to achieve the calm, passive, meditative state necessary to contact the spirits herself (and essential to the ideal middle-class woman), qualities antithetical to her very being. In a stanza from one of her untitled poems of 1854, Martha described the effusive energy that women could not and should not bridle:
Yet I'll not curb my spirit down
Nor bow to fashion's iron will.
And through my brain my thoughts shall course
In freedom still!
Four years later, at the age of thirty-one, Martha continued to grapple with the cult of domesticity, to acknowledge and value her animated vigor, and to come to terms with the path laid before her:
I do not usually feel older than I did a dozen years ago. Here I am 31 years old, really quite an old maid . May I grow old gracefully! If I am to be an old maid may I be an honor to the sisterhood. And help to redeem it from the stigma that is so often cast upon it. May I feel the glory and dignity of true womanhood and live it.
So, like the millgirls and teachers, this woman, living in "single blessedness," struggled to define her own version of womanhood, one that accounted for her independent spirit and recognized the honor of autonomy and economic self-sufficiency.[38]
In an equally feminist vein, the Adams sisters of Manchester, New Hampshire—Hannah, Mary, and Margaret—all independent wageearners, were profoundly swayed by the abolitionist and temperance critiques of the American legal system, and in particular the laws concerning slavery and marriage. In a letter to their mother in 1842 they jointly articulated the parallel between the condition of slaves and that of women, a minority position heard consistently in abolitionist circles before the Civil War:
My dear Mother, we are not wanting in affection for you, but do you, can you as one so kind & tender-hearted to your children, believe this dreadful doctrine that your daughters were born slaves to serve you until they are married & afterwards it may be to serve drunken husbands? It were better that they had never been born than m be born slaves. But Mother you do not believe it, I feel that you do not believe it. Are we not as good & free to act for ourselves as your sons? If we are not, pray tell us, for we are yet to learn that daughters of freeborn citizens are not as free as sons according to the laws of our country.[39]
These few examples illustrate working women's knowledge of the cultural messages promulgated by and for the antebellum middle class. Their awareness, far from guaranteeing that they adopted or even aspired to the prescriptive ideals, strengthened their skepticism as often as it encouraged their conformity. Subjects actively evaluated messages, consciously assessing their rationality, value, worthiness, appropriate-
ness, and desirability, before making decisions about how to proceed in their own lives. The extensive historical evidence presented in this book refutes the view that all women participated in the cult of domesticity or accepted a place in the private sphere.
Men and the Division of Household Labor
The working men of my research did not consistently follow the rigid division of labor prescribed by the culture of separate spheres. The theory of separate spheres posits that the division of labor became rigid in the nineteenth century, and that men and women faithfully observed it. Although there were indeed traditions regarding the division of labor, they lacked a consistent principle and varied dramatically by region. In fact, the men in my study broke many gender "rules" casually and routinely.[40]
Fully thirty percent of the male diarists under study commonly recorded doing household chores, shopping for food, washing clothes, and caring for children. Washing clothes, unquestionably a labor-intensive chore, required heating water, scrubbing layers of dirt, moving wet, heavy clothes from one tub to another, and wringing many yards of fabric free of excess water. Two or more people often did the wash, a task that would be difficult for one individual. Elizabeth Metcalf wrote to her mother-in-law that when visitors arrived on the morning of June 15, 1857, her husband "Charles had just finished his washing ." In what sounds very much like a late-twentieth-century negotiated division of labor, Elizabeth reported that Charles "has washed twice, does not make any fuss about it." An anonymous farm woman in Newburyport, Massachusetts recorded matter-of-factly, "Husband & I washed." Farmer Horatio Chandler recorded that he "assisted wife about washing a.m." On an extremely cold morning in January, 1859, John Plummer Foster "washed the clothes for the family, with the machine." Brigham Nims ironed clothes in addition to helping with the wash: "Helped Mother iron then mowed the oats," he wrote, and on another occasion, "Fixt my cloths. Cleaned. Ironed & mended &c." Most indicators point to the fact that men who did laundry regarded their work as assistance as opposed to responsibility.[41]
These examples contradict the notion that a culture of strictly separated spheres pervaded the lives of working men or, as we will see, circumscribed the activities of women. Definitions of men's and women's work were hardly absolute, and nineteenth-century culture had sufficient
flexibility to accommodate divergent work practices. The matter-of-fact way that all of these men recorded their activities indicates that their practices were probably typical. If their behavior was unusual to others, it was not to them.[42]
Why were men and women able to mingle extensively and to engage in work deemed appropriate for the opposite sex, while living in separate spheres defined by the cult of true womanhood? The most obvious explanation is that advice books did not successfully dictate the way people lived. They might have set standards for debate, but they did not always exert substantial influence on how people lived their lives. Reliance on prescriptive literature has distorted twentieth-century perceptions of behavior in the nineteenth century. Diaries, letters, and autobiographies indicate that cultural prescriptions were neither as pervasive nor as inflexible as twentieth-century scholars have inferred.
Another possible explanation lies in the mode of production. Selfemployment as an artisan or farmer enabled involvement in the various kinds of activities—producing, maintaining, renewing—that took place in the household. When production was in the home, boundaries between paid and unpaid labor and between men's and women's work were more fluid, even while gender-based areas of responsibility existed. The solidification of separate spheres for men and women occurred only in the urban middle class, if it occurred anywhere, where the distinction between work and home life was more pronounced because industrialization had taken greater hold over the organization of work.[43]
A third, less persuasive, explanation concerns material resources. One could argue that poor people actually aspired to the ideal of domesticity but because of their economic circumstances were unable to observe its precepts. I find this argument unconvincing. The diaries, letters, and autobiographies reveal that subjects rarely aspired to middle-class standards and repeatedly rejected them in practice. Furthermore, working women constructed their own vision of womanhood. Most women liked to work and enjoyed the freedom made possible by even limited economic autonomy.
The ideologies of true womanhood and separate spheres may have pervaded antebellum culture in sermons, advice books, literature, and the like, but the everyday practices of the working people of this study made the ideologies largely irrelevant. In their letters, diaries, and autobiographies, the working-class and farm men and women were not receptive to these ideals. They constructed their own, which grew out of their own experience and culture.