Feminization of the American Culture in Victorian America - Research Paper Example

Feminization of the American culture in Victorian America Introduction Although Queen Victoria ruled Great Britain from 1837 until her death in 1901, her influence during what has been labeled the Victorian Age stretched across the ocean to touch the lands of America, albeit a little delayed. Therefore, the American Victorian Age is typically considered to have taken place roughly between the years of 1876 as Reconstruction following the Civil War was winding down and 1914 when the First World War, then known as the Great War, began. This was a time full of rapid change in America, in which every aspect of society was affected. The country gained 12 new states, doubling its geographical area, voted on 10 new amendments to their constitution and increased its population by more than twice its number at the beginning of this period. “Americans were becoming more diverse, more urban, and more mobile.” (“America after,” 2006) Slavery had legally come to an end and an entirely new population was struggling to redefine itself and find a home. Social norms were questioned and the preconceptions of the elders were no longer automatically assumed honorable. Technology had changed too, bringing with it the mechanized tools of the factory, enabling large groups of workers to earn living wages within a single location rather than struggle to grow crops out on the farm. With the advent of the machine and the production line, more and more Americans were moving to the cities to seek work, bringing the women in from the fields on the farms to the kitchens and family rooms of the middle class. This emerging middle class gave birth to what has since been referred to as the Cult of the True Woman, coined first by Barbara Welter in the mid-1960s, (Welter, 1966) a set of ideas and beliefs regarding the proper structure of the quintessential American family. However, through this ideology, women were brought into closer contact with one another, gaining power and voice enough to finally give rise to the feminist movements that marked the tremendous strides toward equal rights that were accomplished in the early part of the twentieth century. Through this process of growth and change, moving from the True Woman to the New Woman, the feminist movement was seen primarily as a masculine movement with very little to suggest the ‘feminization of American culture’, with its emphasis on compassion, consideration and control that would emerge in the twenty-first century. The True Woman In leaving the farms for the cities with the new modernization of the cities and factories, Welter and others hypothesized that it became necessary for women to uphold the traditional ideologies the family had held dear while in a rural setting, thereby restricting them to a single idealized image of what embodies the True Woman. (Welter, 1966) The concept of the True Woman was founded on four core principles – those of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. According to Hewitt, “native born northern white women became an increasingly undifferentiated category, all middle-class adherents of a dominant ideal. As work on women who stood outside the cult’s reach multiplied, then, true womanhood lost its contested, dynamic character and became hostage to all the retrograde values that affluent white womanhood masked in a field newly focused on difference and conflict.” (Hewitt, 2002) The hierarchy of these four core values was further delineated by Welter in their order of social importance. Because religion didn’t take women away from her proper place within the home like so many other societies or movements did, piety was considered a safe avenue for a woman to pursue. Next to piety, purity was necessary in order to access the power inherent in the cult. However, this power was expected to be relinquished upon the wedding night as the woman traded in her purity, setting up a paradox that proved difficult to explain away. Therefore, submission became a defining aspect of the feminine, also placing her squarely by her own fireside first as daughter and sister, later as wife and mother, bringing in the fourth dimension of domesticity. “If she chose to listen to other voices than those of her proper mentors, sought other rooms than those of her home, she lost both her happiness and her power.” (Welter, 1966) By the time the Victorian era reached America, the ideal middle class life was firmly established as consisting of a father going off to work and a mother who stayed at home and reared the children. “The onset of industrialization at the beginning of the nineteenth century highlighted differences among women just as it exacerbated those between men and women workers.” (Kessler-Harris) Widows, single women and others flocked to the mill towns of New England, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey attracted by the relatively high wages that could be earned in the factories, but even this began to change as the factory owners began working to reduce costs, lowering wages and demanding more work. At the same time, the more prosperous married women were prevented from holding any kind of job, instead expected to uphold the traditional feminine values of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. The New Woman Through this very restricted, hostile environment, several women’s groups organized to try to effect change and bring about more fulfilling or safer lives for their children. Although individuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Judith Sargent Murray advocated “increased independence for women through access to education” (Woloch) in the 1700s, it wasn’t until the middle 1800s that changes began in earnest. “Thousands of women in the 1830s and 1840s joined moral reform societies, organized to end licentiousness, seduction, and prostitution. Female temperance societies strove to save abused wives and families from drunken spouses. Individual reformers spoke out for women's rights.” (Woloch) At the same time, other women, such as Catherine Beecher, worked to extend high education to girls by opening up specialized schools that taught not only the traditional requirements, but instructed young women in academic subjects as well. Both within and without the cult, women were beginning to rebel against its constraining aspects from early on, whether they realized what they were doing or not. Roberts illustrates how journalism and the theater worked as a valve through which women were able to explore their more ‘subversive’ thoughts as well as to reach other similar minded women. “Both journalism and theater … gave women access to worlds where they were not subject to the limits imposed on the self by True Womanhood.” (Roberts, (2002, p. 153.) For those women who felt the cult was correct in that the True Woman held a special bond with the Supreme Being that enabled her to adhere more closely to the tenets of the traditional belief system, it was a natural extension to feel that it was these individuals who should be heard within the greater community as a force to protect the very home in which she was given dominion. For others, accepting the yoke of the True Woman was a hindrance to their expressing what they felt were equally valid thoughts and ideas, wishing to be able to pursue their limits to the same degree as men without the unnatural restrictions imposed on them by those men. There were many women who helped show the way, but two in particular, Catherine Beecher and Francis Willard, who invoked the strength of the True Woman and worked within the cult to bring about the social change they felt was necessary in obtaining the evolution of the cult to that of the New Woman. The View of Feminism Tracing through the history of the Victorian Age in America, it can be expected that the view of society toward women involved in the feminist movement would depend in large part upon what they’d heard and witnessed for themselves to that point. The times were changing quickly, ideas were springing up as fast as the machines could create new parts and women were gaining power at unprecedented rates with the development of new jobs in the factories and new access to education. Each new freedom or right won led to another being sought as the women moved their way toward equality one small step at a time. Each step represented a logical step forward as women sought to educate their daughters, daughters used their new educations to bring forward necessary social change and the necessary social change brought forward still more inequities in the system. The approach taken in supporting these ideals would have a large impact upon how the movement was seen. An understanding of the depth to which the idea of the True Woman took hold is necessary to understand just how masculine and unattractive a New Woman could appear to the traditionalist. She was demanding, relentless, determined and completely out of the control of any man. Her behavior was so completely unladylike in even expressing a desire to be heard that she was considered almost genderless. Her willingness to stand up for her rights, demand to be heard and insistence upon winning the vote were shocking not only to the men, but to the women who had previously supported the True Woman concept. That women would want something more than the simple life of cooking, cleaning and caring for her family was beyond the scope of the imagination and represented an unnatural creature full of self-indulgence and deviltry. That a woman was ready to do battle for her rights indicated that she was no woman at all, but a man trapped within a woman’s skin. That psychology began explaining lesbian relationships as pathological even while this condition figured prominently in many people’s stereotype of a feminist indicates the degree to which society in general viewed the movement as unnatural and grotesque. However, great women rose out of this culture that understood these oppositional forces, because they, too, subscribed to the ideals of the True Woman. Because of women such as Catherine Beecher and Francis Willard who worked from within the concept of the True Woman, an image of the feminist as a woman doing the job she was selected by God to do by obtaining the power of the vote and equal rights under the law, not everyone viewed the movement as something unnatural. In fact, by looking at the issue in the way that these women saw it, the feminist movement was a natural and unavoidable outcome of the True Woman ideal. As a True Woman, it was the responsibility of the wife to protect her children from all harm, but she needed the right to own property and the parental rights to her children if she was to adequately provide this protection. As a True Woman, the wife was also responsible for ensuring dinner was on the table every night. However, if she was not able to obtain decent employment making a living wage, she would not be able to provide this necessary dinner in the event that her husband left the family, died or neglected to bring his wages home from the factory before visiting the bar. If she was to provide assistance in protecting the home and family from outside invasion of unchristian or other harmful ideas, she must also have some say in deciding what ideas, practices, businesses and policies should be made to aid in that protection. In short, by pursuing the vote and equal rights, the feminist was merely carrying out the duties that had been assigned to her within the realm of the True Woman. That it exceeded the boundaries of what the society in general had in mind, while true, was irrelevant. Conclusion Although women came to America expecting some of the same liberties and freedoms their men fought for, it was a long time before they were able to enjoy the rights and freedoms they enjoy today. In the early days, women exercised some considerable freedom, especially if unmarried, to take up professional positions among the colonies, but as the educational requirements for these types of positions increased; women’s inability to obtain the proper education prevented them from entering these fields. Because women were not generally sent to higher education centers, typically obtaining only the ability to read among their other subjects which rotated around becoming a good housewife and mother, most women were forced to work in professions that consisted of factory labor, home maintenance (maids), seamstresses or other menial tasks. Women of color were even further restricted to the status of slave, house servant or janitorial work. It wasn’t until the mid-1800s, the Victorian Age that women began organizing to bring about the social changes that were necessary to provide them with the rights necessary to fulfill those responsibilities they were charged with. While some women worked to set up schools and other institutions of learning that catered to educating young women in academic subjects, others worked to obtain legal rights and responsibilities that would allow them to change the laws that restricted them within their homes and kept them away from the public sphere. Looking at the various viewpoints and changes happening during these Victorian years, it is possible to imagine that Victorian America had little idea of how these events would lead to the ‘feminization of American culture.’ Although this trend could have been foreseen if one cared to look deeply into the issues and the means by which women were enacting change while still remaining consistent with their own identities. By focusing on the home and hearth as the necessary driving factors for obtaining feminine rights, women’s political motives were, by definition, ‘soft’ and liberal. Because they were the gender assigned with the protection of the home, their movements and proposals centered on the defensive. Having learned first-hand the invisible shackles that bound them in times of difficulty, such as the inability to hold jobs, own property or bring lawsuits, women were naturally inclined to be compassionate toward the victim and supporting of social change that was perceived to be the best solution to the problem. However, the masculine nature of these ideas, the unthinkable notion of women working in the public sphere, obtaining educations equal to or greater than men and having the capacity to both care for a family and carry on such public functions struck the society as being so out of character that it took some time before the shock value wore off enough to take a more objective look. By that time, things were happening so fast that it would have been difficult for a Victorian American to have foreseen how these actions would eventually manifest themselves in the culture of the future. There was little time to reminisce either, as the world was soon after plunged into war, relying on men and women alike to support the war effort and heading irrevocably down the road to recognition of women’s liberty and participation in the culture of tomorrow. References “America after the Civil War.” (2006). Education. Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art. Hewitt, Nancy. (2002). “Taking the True Woman Hostage.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1, pp. 156-62. Kessler-Harris, Alice. (n.d.). “Women and the Work Force.” The Reader’s Companion to American History. Houghton Mifflin Company. Retrieved March 27, 2010 from < http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/rc_093200_womenandthew.htm> Roberts, Mary Louise. “True Woman Revisited.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1. Spring 2002, pp. 150-55. Welter, Barbara. (1966). “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1, pp. 151-74. Woloch, Nancy. (n.d. b). “Feminist Movement: From its Origins to 1960.” Reader’s Companion to American History. Retrieved March 27, 2010 from < http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/rc_030901_ifromitsorig.htm> Read More