Evan Lefkowitz - the Cult of True Womanhood:apush, Mr. Kennedy

Evan Lefkowitz

The Cult of True Womanhood:Apush, Mr. Kennedy

The Cult Of True Womanhood, 1820-1860, was an American ideology that women were best suited for tasks associated with maintaining their home and family. The cult stated piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness were the four central characteristics of a woman's identity. It articulated the woman's proper role as the family’s moral guardian because of their pure innocent soul. Women were responsible for cleaning and protecting the home, caring for the children, and always being the husband. If the wife did not fulfill these tasks, she would lose her innocence and her womanhood. As a result of being socially coerced to stay home, women developed their own sphere in society, entirely separate from their husbands.

The rapid growth of industrialization in the nineteenth century contributed to the notion that the women's place was in the home. Industrialization led to men being outside the home in pursuit of a livelihood and employment. Although women had done a variety of work from running inns and husbandry, their traditional work was present within the home. Since that job was still necessary, and women had always done it for centuries, they were inevitably the ones who should continue and remain in the home. With industrialization, women felt like prisoners, confined to their homes. Women had no power, only the status of their husbands. In the late nineteenth century only 18% of women worked outside their house. Many nineteenth century women felt guilty because they believed that they did not live up to the ideal of True Womanhood. Some blamed themselves, some challenged the norm, others tried to maintain their virtues an increase the spectrum of womanhood.

The Cult of True Womanhood was an attempt by male authors to prevent women from taking advantage of the new opportunities now available in America’s new industrial society. The newspaper, “Yellow Wallpaper,” was symbolic of the Cult of True Womanhood, which binded women to the home and family. Male authors wrote of women being constricted to the set rules that their husbands determined. Women were supposed to accept these terms and remain in their private sphere. “If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex virtues which made up True Womanhood, he was dammed immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic” (Welter 372). Magazines and related literature encouraged the ideal of the True Womanhood. One magazine stated that a true woman’s place was unquestionably by her fireside - as a daughter, a sister, but most of all as a wife and mother. Therefore, domesticity was among the virtues most prized by women’s magazines. Another magazine stated that, “society is constituted on the domestic and social