DomesticAdvice
Economic development pulled men out of the home more quickly than women, intensifying the gender division of labor. Within the prosperous classes, wives and mothers were seldom required to contribute income to the household.
They were, however, required to devote substantial time and effort to domestic work, supervising and often working side by side with their cooks, maids, and nannies. Many of these relatively well-educated women developed a hunger for both technical and moral advice. In both Britain and the United States, a burgeoning literature of domesticity explained how women could become queens and angels of the home.Even the liberal Harriet Taylor had acknowledged the power of the so-called ‘‘civilizing influence'' argument: Women should defend their own sacred sphere in order to counterbalance the violence and corruption that men were inflicting on the profane world. The concept of virtuous womanhood had contradictory implications. On the one hand, it could be deployed against any threat that women might withdraw their services in the home, helping to keep them in their place. On the other, it carried anticapitalist connotations, identifying masculinity and the market as dangerously kindred forces that could only be controlled and civilized by women.
In the mid-nineteenth century women, once considered temptresses, were increasingly depicted with a glow of selfless virtue. The moralization of femininity was particularly prominent in the United States and England, where it percolated through the culture, from manuals of domestic advice to philosophical treatises, from poetry to political economy. Traditional ideals of domesticity offered a buffer against rapid social and economic change. Queen Victoria became the emblem of moral fortitude as well as prudish etiquette.1
The Victorian frame of mind was characterized by considerable anxiety about religious values.
In 1865, the prominent Irishman William Lecky reiterated the traditional Christian vision: A man with foreknowledge of heaven and hell should recognize that he would be punished for selfishness. Fear of punishment, however, seemed to be declining. If the progress of civilization could be expected to encourage virtue, its effects would come primarily through women, whose moral superiority over men was, Lecky, believed, unquestionable: ‘‘Self-sacrifice is the most conspicuous element of a virtuous and religious character and it is certainly far less common among men than among women, whose lives are usually spent in yielding to the will and consulting the pleasures of another.”2 Not incidentally, Lecky referred to Mandeville’s economic defense of greed and lust as “grotesque” and ‘‘repulsive’’.3Economic development seemed to increase the temptations toward selfish behavior even as it weakened religious self-confidence.4 If men could not love one another, it seems, they could at least love their wives. How could they not? The very purpose of women was to bring out the best in men. As Coventry Patmore explained in his versified paean to domesticity, The Angel in the House, ‘‘Man must be pleased; but him to please is women’s pleasure.’’5 The two-volume work blending exhortations to virtue with romantic passion was received with great enthusiasm and widely quoted throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.
Moral inspiration was easily added to lists of women’s household duties. In her famous book of advice to the mothers of England, Mrs. Sarah Ellis described mother love as far too powerful a force to be ‘‘trifled with in the nursery or expended in infantine indulgence.’’ It should be extended to the ‘‘great family of earth.’’6 A later instruction book, Female Piety: The Young Woman’s Friend and Guide, made women’s responsibilities absolutely clear: ‘‘It is essential to your making home happy that there should be much self-denial, a spirit of forbearance, an occasional surrender, for the sake of peace, of supposed rights, a willingness to forego what you could rightfully claim as your own.’’7 Not all domestic advice books struck such a submissive tone.
Mrs. Beeton, author of Household Management, a classic cookbook and instruction manual published in 1861, emphasized simpler virtues such as frugality, charity, and rising at an early hour.8Ironically, the most Victorian manual of household advice was published not in England but in the United States. The Beecher sisters' American Woman’s Home, published in 1869 (discussed briefly in Chapter 14) praised women's self-abnegating virtues. Catherine Beecher has been described as a domestic feminist because she so enthusiastically celebrated women's contributions to society. The term seems a misnomer for someone who disapproved of female participation in public life.9 Beecher later became more tolerant of feminist impatience. Women could and should leave the home, she argued, but not to become factory workers. They should work as teachers, as reformers, as moral guardians to benefit the nation as a whole rather than a ‘‘self-interested class of businessmen''.10 Women, in other words, should become the mothers of civilization.11