Title: The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835
Author: Nancy Cott
Year of Publication: 1977
Thesis:
The "bonds of womanhood" Sarah Grimke refers to serve a dual purpose: to explain how white, middle-class, married, Protestant women in 19th-century New England saw themselves as bound to marriage contracts and bonded to one another in "sisterhood." These connections developed through their common experiences as white, middle-class, married, Protestant women, especially in the sociality they had in the Church, as parents, and in initiatives to reform women. Cott concedes neither that they were completely dominated by coverture nor did they enjoy unchecked authority through their domesticity, relatively recent literacy, religion, or sense of sisterhood. Instead, she makes best use of a short book to explore these tensions governing domestic and male-centered public spheres where these women saw themselves as different but equal. Despite their anxieties about acquiring suitable white, middle-class, Protestant, male partners, white, middle-class, Protestant women exchanged, at least in principle if not in substance, their subordinated identity by law, dominion over money, public affairs, and right to rationality, for authority in "matters of the heart."
Time: 1780-1835
Geography: New England (Mainly MA & CT, but also RI, VT, NH, and ME)
Organization:
Acknowledgments
Introduction
- This is rich - just read again.
1. Work
- Opens w/Martha ballard as emblematic of middle-class, white women in Early America (19)
- Defines work as related to sexual identity (20)
- Women's work is devalued
- Legal conditions of marriage proscribe women's motivation for economic ambition? (21) <--?
- Men seen as the engine of economic activity (21)
- Interdependance in the home dilutes the importance of women's work (and therefore the loss of ambition?) (22)
- The idea of the household dominates even after the economy shifts (23)
- Describes market-oriented to manufacturing shift as:
- agriculture, transportation, *specialization, *division of labor, & industry consolidation & concentration (24,25)
- Time period can predict the type of work people did
- Ex: late 18th century, women working at home & making products (I have a question about servants in this whole book)
- Unmarried women produce & also serve in others homes (28)
- Domestic "help" is essential (28)
- Unmarried women teach, too (30-31) (for some, more of a duty than essential, 32)
- Teaching shifts to a necessity as "market-oriented" production takes place (32)
- Religion and teaching go hand-in-hand
- Teaching considered a respectable profession
2. Domesticity
- Much literary/non-fiction instruction for women
- Home as the refuge and sanctuary ("there is no place like home" is coined during this period")
- Bourgeois respectability/virtue vs. aristocratic frivolity
- "Woman" and "home" become synonymous and opposite from public life (ergo, a woman can refer to her attention to the domestic realm as "retirement")
- In the home is "anti-pecuniary" vs. outside, which is pecuniary
- Idea was that women could use their "moral power" to train children and soothe their husband's anxieties and frustrations about the social/economic changes happening outside the home (she is therefore, under this rubric, contributing to the progress of the nation)
- Also, women didn't have legal right to property/earnings
- Women's "unselfishness" and "disinterestedness" seem to explain "bourgeois virtue" really well, in that they are both moral and economic roles of care and staying out of public (men's) lives.
- Women writers become forefront promoting this ideology
- Ex: school girls should pursue purity, affiliation (treating others well, etc.) vs. boys' education - education, success, etc.
- Difficult to manage a family / household - women describing it as stressful and blaming themselves (see: women's diaries she references in chapter)
- Choosing men was a precarious affair (bond is not easy to break) & she demonstrates how in women's letters from one to another their concerns and anxieties
- Mothers considered the educators and caretakers of children in the home (also, heavily religiously based)
- Journaling evinces scientific rearing of children (88)
- Motherhood as joy & burden (90)
- Add "self-denial" to women's domestic virtue (91)
- Interprets sex as both what aligns women (not class) and how sex and work roles become synonymous (100)
3. Education
- Literacy widely available in 1840 NE vs. 60 years prior (101)
- Signing one's name is the way we figure this out
- Post-primary ed for girls needed justification (104)
- Reference to Benjamin Rush's book - important to make a woman useful for a man (105)
- Conversely, men's education had to do with preparation for employment (taken from Locke, Franklin) (108)
- Negative image of educated women persisted - concerns about them having "false gentility" or becoming too full of themselves (110)
- Schools for girls also taught mostly by women (115)
- Good quote: "As Benjamin Rush had announced decades before, the
strongest justification for educating women lay in the social utility and political value of well-instructed mothers." (120)
- Insistence of the non-existence of classes (see: quote from Beecher) (123-4)
- Women, it turns out, didn't stick to only books that guided them domestically as they became educated; suggests there is also a tendency to unite as women because of this schooling (125) * This would explain the exclusionary nature of "womanhood" based on race.
4. Religion
- Women dominate the church in sex-segregated prayer
- Women found "self & community"
- Religion gave life a sense of purpose and order (139)
- Religious conversion parallels earlier conversations about submission in the home (139)
- Religion allows women to rely on a higher power (not men) (140)
- Women leverage religion to examine gender roles (140)
- voluntary association (143)
- Ministers get on board but also use women's sphere rhetoric to attempt to channel and contain women's power
- Women use their authority to develop initiatives to "reform" women while calling out male abusers. (153)
5. Sisterhood
- Different but equal concept (men - strength & rationality; women "qualities of the heart.") (161)
- Notion that women sought out one another for support (161)
- Often frendhsips between women are rooted in religious framework (179) *makes sense, as they are most numerous in churches, do their reform work as Protestant women, etc.
- Marriage is a necessity in order to enjoy sisterhood (193)
- Friend - (p173)
Conclusion: On "Woman's Sphere" and Feminism
List of Women's Documents Consulted
List of Ministers' Sermons Consulted
Index
Type:
Methods:
Sources:
Historiography:
Keywords:
First Great Awakening
Second Great Awakening
Merchant Capitalism
Mercantile Capitalism
Domestic retirement
Sisterhood
Friend - used to mean family; changes to a modern concept during this period.
Themes:
Critiques:
Questions:
Even in its rather basic sense, could a cookbook not signify white midle-class status + a way of claiming domestic authority?
Quotes:
Notes: