True Women and Moral Mothers

I. Rise of “true womanhood”

  • Shift from locating “virtue” in the civic realm to the private sphere
    • Reaction to the volatile economy; partisan politice
  • Emergence of “separate spheres”
    • Ideology v. reality
  • Conception of white, affluent women as pure, pious, domestic and subordinate
  • “Passionlessness”
    • White, MC women increasingly perceived as more virtuous than men

II. Assessing the ideal of the passionless, true woman 

  • Repressing women by putting them on a pedestal?
  • Why did some women promote these ideas?
    • Reversed the older tradition of mistrust of women
    • Allowed women to claim moral superiority
      • Cornerstone of female reform movements
    • Created collective consciousness among women
      • Promoted female friendships and intimacy
      • Passionate relationships between women not stigmatized
    • Assisted women in their attempts to practice family limitation

III. History of abortion

  • No statutory laws regarding abortion prior to the 19th century
  • Common law
    • Abortion a crime only after “quickening”
      • Even after quickening, the destruction of a fetus was viewed as qualitatively different from, and punished less harshly, than murder
        • A “heinous misdemeanor”
  • Prior to 1830s, abortion was relatively rare
    • Estimate: 1 out of every 25-30 births
    • Not seen as a method of family limitation
    • Unmarried women (“victims of passion”)
  • First state laws (1821-41) punished only the person who performed the abortion
    • Aimed at regulating the activities of apothecaries, midwives, “irregulars”
  • From 1840-1870s, incidence of abortion rose sharply
    • Estimate for 1850s-60s: 1 out of every 5 or 6 births
    • Included married, “respectable” women
      • Played into nativism and racism
  • Became much more publicly visible
    • Commercialization
  • 1860-80: Highpoint of anti-abortion crusade
    • Led by American Medical Association, not religious leaders
      • Promoted the idea of pregnancy as a continuous process
      • Attempted to convince public that abortion before quickening was tantamount to murder
  • During this time, almost every state criminalized abortion performed at any point during the pregnancy
    • Women and abortionists now both culpable
    • Advertising abortifacients also criminalized
  • Nevertheless, many women continued to procure illegal abortions with relative ease until the 1940-1950s

IV. Woman’s rights advocates on abortion

  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and others viewed abortion (and even contraception) with trepidation
    • Did not believe that severing the connection between sexuality and reproduction would be liberate women
      • Feared male licentiousness; degradation of motherhood
    • Yet criminalizing abortion was not part of their political agenda
      • Argued that the guilt lay with men who impregnated women
    • Supported the idea of “voluntary motherhood”
      • Giving women the right to regulate sexual relations

V. Family as the “cradle of the middle class”

  • How were Americans defining class?
    • Not just about wealth
    • Work; consumption; manners & emotional styles; family structure
      • Self-control
  • Work increasingly detached from home
    • Rise of non-manual labor (clerks)
  • Smaller families
    • Intensive investment in childrearing
      • Young men supported by their families well into their 20s

VI. Victorian Motherhood

  • The importance of “Mother Love” increasingly emphasized (Jan Lewis)
    • Emphasis on instilling internal conscience through the provision or withdrawal of love
  • Generating guilt/shame or an ‘internal censor’
  • Different from the older method of external restraint: (i.e. “spare the rod”)
  • Intensive mothering (v. the extensive mothering of colonial women)
  • Emergence of first advice manuals for mothers; maternal associations
  • Victorians did not emphasis the cultivation of independence or autonomy
    • “Silver cord”
  • Mother love as a redemptive force
  • Mother-son relationship sentimentalized, even romanticized

VII. Marriage

  • Increasing emphasis placed on love and emotional fulfillment and happiness
  • Stephanie Coontz: “By the middle of the nineteenth century there was near unanimity . . . . that the love-based marriage, in which the wife stayed home protected and supported by her husband, was a recipe for heaven on earth.”
  • Evident in the mid-19th century attacks on Mormonism and polygamy

VIII. Sarah Josepha Hale

  • Left a widow in 1822; became a writer to support herself.
  • Left children in care of relatives, relocated to Boston to become editor of a magazine, Ladies Magazine and Literary Gazette
  • Became editor of Godeys’ Ladies Book in 1837
  • Campaigned for Thanksgiving to be a national holiday
    • Lincoln declared one 1863
    • Before then, a New England holiday, no set date

IX. Catherine Beecher, 1800-78

  • Founder of home economics
  • Became a teacher at 20
  • Opposed to women voting
    • Feared compromising women’s moral authority
    • Sought “the elevation of my sex”
  • Treatise on Domestic Economy, 1841
    • Practical, not overly sentimental
  • Never married or ran her own home