All right. Let us move on from the
revolutionary period and the early republic into what we
call the antebellum era. That literally means "before the
war," so referencing the Civil War. Broadly, though, we can say this is the first half or the middle of the 19th century, the 1800s. We'll
focus on a specific person, Catherine Beecher, as an example, kind of an exception
that proves the role of women in this time period
in the United States. Her family is really extraordinary.
They are kind of this iconic family in New England that is involved in all the
kind of issues that were going on during this time period.
You had several ministers that were influential. Lyman
Beecher is also involved in reform, specifically temperance
against drinking alcohol. He's also anti-Catholic, which is a pretty
negative perspective at this point. Harriet Beecher Stowe
is most famous for writing the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
which is an anti-slavery novel. She also wrote a book that we'll look at
in a few minutes with Catherine Beecher as well. There was suffragists. Henry Ward Beecher is an another
minister in the family, known for being tried in court for
adultery a little bit later in 1875 from having an affair
with a married woman. Interestingly, two famous
suffragists were involved in publicizing this case. There
was a lot of sort of social upheaval about this kind of issue at the
time. He was exonerated for adultery, however. He's also known for becoming involved in the Bleeding Kansas
situation, which is this political crisis in the Kansas Territory
over whether it should be set up as a pro- or anti-slavery
territory and then state. Literally came to violence. People
died. He was sending what was called Beecher's Bibles,
which is a euphemism for rifles, to Kansas. Lots of people
from New England that are abolitionists are involving
themselves in this way through material or financial support
in this situation really far away in Kansas because
it was so crucial to this national issue of slavery and the
expansion of slavery into new territories. Then Catherine
Beecher, who we're going to talk about in more detail, was this really interesting woman. She's
very involved in education. She attended a formal school, and then opened her own school, Hartford Female Seminary.
She was really agitating for women's education generally, especially
to then become teachers and educate others. Then,
her books that she was writing--several books at this time--were
focused on women's roles as mothers as well as educators, as domestic people. That that is the sphere of
their world and is their appropriate sphere, in her opinion. We'll start by looking at the
education aspect of this. She had attended this Litchfield
Female Academy herself. This had been
established in 1792. We can recall what we talked about
before about Republican Motherhood. That the education of women during
the late 1700s and early 1800s was seen as crucial for the formation
of the new nation of the United States. Women should be educated
at least to a certain degree. Catherine has this background
herself as a student, and then she establishes her own higher
education institution in 1823. These really were the only way that
women could have any advanced education of any kind. Other institutions that had been around for a
long time were only for men, generally speaking. There are a
few exceptions. Oberlin was founded in 1833 and admitted
women from the start. Mount Holyoke, which started as a women's
college, or seminary, now college, opened in 1837. There were a few
similar examples going on. These were real institutions
of higher education. They had a demanding curriculum that
included not only academics, but also arts and education and moral behavior or,
generally speaking, Christian behavior, which was
fairly normal at the time as part of higher education. Catherine
Beecher has this background in education. She goes on, then,
to write books for the public. One of the most influential examples
is this treatise on economic, or excuse me, "Treatise on Domestic Economy"
from 1841. It's for young ladies at home and at school. It's
another form of education that she's providing to the public.
You can see from the dedication, it is dedicated to
"American mothers, whose intelligence and virtues have
inspired admiration and respect ..." She's saying this is valuable. That women are influential in the domestic environment, in the home.
This is a book that will help them do that the best that they can.
You can see from parts of the table of contents, it's covering so
much. This is a huge, huge book, hundreds of pages long.
It's got stuff on how to appropriately take care of the wood
fires and fireplaces and stoves and lamps. It's got issues about
exercise and health because women are not only responsible
for taking care of the home and the family through
cooking and cleaning and whatnot, but also through their
physical health. There's children's games and sports, for
example. Hospitality: how to take care of guests. The health benefits of early rising,
waking up early in the morning. It just covers everything, and you can
see that in these illustrations from the same book. There's
even diagrams of how things should be built in the home and
how they work mechanically, like this is a dumbwaiter that you
would use to move objects. It's like a small elevator for … It doesn't hold a
person, though. It's only a little box that holds, for
example, food that needs to be transported upstairs or whatnot. There's
even anatomical diagrams in here. They're learning about health
in terms of science. It's not just instructions on how to clean and keep
your family healthy. It's literally anatomy. Things like how to propagate rose bushes, how to graft
them. There's some botany and gardening in
there, propagation of plants. It's really
wide-ranging. It's definitely looking at the domestic sphere in terms of it
being a science, like the science of home economics, let's say. This is kind of the beginning of
that vision. It's really focusing on this domestic sphere. For example, in the treatise that we've been looking at, she says, "The
woman has an equal interest in all social and civil concerns; and that no domestic, civil, or political,
institution, is right, which sacrifices her interest to promote
that of the other sex." She's agitating to some
degree for an equality of women and men. Then it says, "But in order to secure her
the more firmly in all these privileges," so civil, political, etc., "it is decided, that, in the domestic
relation, she take a subordinate station, and that, in civil and political concerns,
her interests be entrusted to the other sex, without her taking
any part in voting, or in making and administering
laws." She's saying that women and men are equal, but they have
different domains. They have different spheres of influence and activity, and
that women's sphere, as we see in this illustration from another book
that she wrote with her relative Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The
American Woman's Home," a little bit later in the 1800s,
it's the home. It's the kitchen. It's the family. Really focusing on the
domestic sphere for women as their rightful sphere. This is relating to what we could say is a … It's based in
Republican Motherhood, in this ideology of the place of women, but in the 1800s,
the middle 1800s, it shifts from this idea of Republican Motherhood
as being for the benefit of the nation into something
much more focused internally on the family. A term we
have for this, which again is a modern term. It
was not used at the time. One word for this ideology, this
transformed ideology, is the Cult of True Womanhood. This is looking really overtly at women being appropriately in
the home. That the home … The home now is this symbol of
refuge. Men are going out into the workplace, into politics, and it's
seen as competitive and immoral. It's corrupting, the outside world,
the world of men's business. The woman's role is to create a
refuge from all that in the home. More and more people, men in
particular but also women--we always have to remember that--are
going to work outside the home. You have this increasingly common
wage labor where you are not, for example, an independent artisan or a
farmer that works your own land. More and more people are
becoming urban. They're living in cities. They're going to work in an
office or a place of work rather than working from home. That really entrenches this
idea or it parallels this idea of two separate spaces,
one for men and one for women. Now, we have to understand, though, or remember that what women
were doing in the home is work. It is labor. They
are working hard taking care of their homes and their
families, but it's unpaid labor. It's not earning money. You start to have
this vision of two kinds of work or that women aren't even really doing work.
It's just what they're supposed to be doing. Alongside with
this vision of women and the place of the home versus work,
you have this vision of what it is to be a woman. What is femininity?
It starts to become very overtly allied with these ideas of the woman
as being the one transmitting piety or religious faith to the family. That
had been going on for a while already already. Then,
additional visions of purity; domesticity, of course; and
submissiveness. These are not new, but they're really being
reconfirmed or re-entrenched through these visions, like
we see in this illustration from a popular magazine that literally
captions the image of a wife and mother as "The Sphere of Woman."
It's something that was really being reinforced overtly during the time.
It's not something that we have to just dig out of the evidence and
interpret. It's pretty obvious. Another word for the
Cult of True Womanhood is the Cult of Domesticity. You see
these terms used equally by historians. It's … The domesticity word is really reinforcing this vision of the home
that we were just talking about. The single family home
is now proposed as the ideal. This is in part because of
the expansion of multi-family homes in the urban setting. You're
starting to have in the middle 1800s the beginning of what eventually became tenement
housing in the late 1800s. You have very dense housing
in cities. You have this re-emphasis on the single-family home
as being the ideal. You start to have suburbs at this time. Before
that, it was really city and country. There was no in-between.
You start to have the suburban white picket fence single family
home ideal that we still have today. You have this, ideally, a separate parlor set aside which is a formal
public space in your home-- you can see that in this
floor plan on the right here-- that is for socializing.
Then you have another ... The rest of the house, but also the
parlor to some degree being also for the private family use. Really
this turning inward to a larger degree. Women are
still this moral guide that goes back to the Republican
Motherhood period, but really they're becoming
more consumers. It's really about what they are
purchasing, how they are feathering their nests to make that sense
of a refuge in the home. This is becoming less related to
politics and citizenship as it was in the Republican Motherhood period
and more about really social structures and cultural aspects
with an increase in consumerism. Back to Catherine Beecher. I
said at the beginning that she's kind of an exception
that proves the rule. She is kind of a paradox
in that way. She's writing these books that are really pushing
hard on this idea of women's place is in the home and in the
family with education, but really not for public reasons. She didn't
really follow that herself. She had this intellectual career outside
her own home. She's traveling around lecturing. She's writing
books for public consumption. This is what people like Mary Kelley
have called "literary domesticity." It's this writing about this
ideal, but not living it. In this sense, we can say that
these ideas are prescriptive, not descriptive. It's prescribing what we should be doing.
It's not describing what we are already doing, to a large degree. This
is pointing out that women's work is really becoming invisible. It's
in the home. The men are not present for it because they're at work outside the home. It's really sort
of devalued in that sense. It's also not acknowledging both that
that is work and that women often had to work outside the home.
This is a very sort of elitist, prescriptive view of
how things should be. The way that this is being discussed, any kind of work that women are doing, it's making it seem like it's not work. It's
just what women should naturally be doing. It's certainly not
earning money necessarily. Really interesting kind
of paradox here or … I wouldn't … I don't know, I don't know if
I want to say hypocritical, but Catherine Beecher certainly did not
walk her talk, let's put it that way. Is this feminism? Was
Beecher a feminist? The word feminist really, according to the Oxford English
Dictionary which is the primary book that we can look up or series
of books, rather--it's humongous-- of when words were first used in the
English language, so not only the definition as a dictionary does
but also its first usage. OED has found that feminist or
feminism was first used in the 1850s. It's a pretty old term, but it's not really
very commonly used or understood as a concept until much later. It's really hard to pin down whether
a person from the 1800s is a feminist because definitions
have changed over time, the concept has changed. By
our modern standards at least, we can say that Beecher was not a feminist.
She was not advocating for equality of the sexes. We've talked about
this before with other women, Mary Wollstonecraft for example much
earlier than Beecher, was saying men and women are equal
in the eyes of God in terms of some natural human, but really not socially
and culturally equal, for example. Beecher is similar. She is saying things that maybe furthered
some women's rights. Women should be
educated, for example They have equal ability, intellectual
ability, for example. Really in other ways, it's very limiting. She's saying, "But
you should really stay home. You should not be involved in business
or politics, for example." Kind of a mixed message and not
what we would, in a modern way, call feminist. Let's sum this up. Catherine Beecher is an advocate
for women's education. Women are naturally, in her view,
educators, and so they needed to be educated themselves. She
became an authority on this idea of domestic economy, quote-unquote,
idealizing women's role in the home, but, of course, this is not the reality.
Again, it's prescriptive, not descriptive. Women's work is invisible in this case,
but it is there and it is still work. She is the paradox herself of domesticity. She's literally
an activist. She is in the public sphere, which is
the opposite of what she's promoting in her books, but she
really can't be described in a modern sense as a feminist--
maybe a precursor. An early proponent of some aspects
of feminism, but not of all. Beecher as an example of what became the role, the social and
cultural role, of women in the United States in the first half roughly
to the middle of the 1800s.