The Meaning of Motherhood
Not all men were convinced that the angel of the house could redeem the sins of capitalist individualism. After all, brotherhood itself, metaphor for male solidarity, was under attack.
The English essayist Thomas Carlyle condemned the disruption of traditional feudal—and patriarchal—order: To live in the business world, he wrote, was like ‘‘living without father, without child, without brother.''12 An equally passionate, but more systematic critique of the new economic world was presented in John Ruskin's Unto This Last, subtitled Four Essays on First Principles of Political Economy and published in 1862. The tract took its name and its moral from the New Testament parable, ‘‘Christ and the Vineyard'', in which all workers were paid the same even though some had worked longer than others. Men's wages, Ruskin argued, should be determined by their level of need—and their need for dignity—rather than by the dictates of the labor market.Ruskin was a Tory conservative, uninterested in the principles of economic justice or equality, but committed to the concept of social obligation, which was, in his view, being undermined by the new emphasis on selfinterest. Classical political economy, he argued, was at odds with England's religious principles.13 He lambasted John Stuart Mill, among others, for his preoccupation with individual rights rather than moral virtue. A ‘‘strange political economy,'' he wrote, ‘‘being but the fulfillment of that which once brought schism into the Polity of Angels and ruin into the Economy of Heaven.”14
Rather than exhorting the wives of England to solve this problem, Ruskin used examples of maternal altruism to counter the conventional presumptions of individualism. He described a mother and child with only a crust of bread between them. An obvious conflict of interest there, he observed, since if one ate the other would go hungry.
Yet the antagonism between them was limited by mutual affection. So should it be between employers and work- ers.15 The true measure of economic success, he wrote, echoing Robert Owen, was not accumulated treasure, but the creation of human capabilities: ‘‘like a Mother, leading forth her sons, saying ‘these are my jewels’.”16 Ruskin was a great fan of Patmore’s Angel in the House. Beyond poetry, however, he longed for an economic system, which, like a family, would train its youth, provide them with employment, and take care of the old, the sick, and the destitute.He painted an oddly maternalist vision of a patriarchal past. Fathers, after all, had retained legal and economic control over both mothers and their jewels. Like many critics of emergent capitalism, Ruskin romanticized his country’s history. Unlike many others, he also romanticized slavery and expressed distinctly racist and ethnocentric views.17 Still, Ruskin’s imagery helps explain why socialists and conservatives were sometimes allied against new economic policies. It also helps explain why defenders of the new economic order strained to explain why it should not cross the threshold of the home.