Ante-bellum America and Issues of Class and Reproduction - Case Study Example

Ante-bellum America and issues and reproduction Outline Introduction Women’s issues in the Antebellum period Cult of True Womanhood Thesis: The position a woman held in society in the antebellum period, North or South, was based largely upon her ability to fit within these narrow definitions of the True Woman and her expected roles. Ideals of the True Woman Piety Purity Submissiveness Domesticity Women and class How the south differed in its ideals of women Yeoman wife as epitome of southern values Planter wife as epitome of northern values Women and reproduction Realities of birth for antebellum women Decline in birth rates in north Abortion as tolerated means of ending pregnancies Practicalities of birth for southern women Abortion becomes a crime Conclusion Ante-bellum America and issues of class and reproduction Following the end of the Civil War, the United States went into a period of rebuilding and redefinition in many respects. One of the ideas that developed during this period among the middle class of the country was the idea of women as the center of the home. Later termed the cult of true womanhood, this phrase refers to an ideology that attempted to define what it meant to be a True Woman in America. “The attributes of True Womanhood, by which a woman judged herself and was judged by her husband, her neighbors and society, could be divided into four cardinal virtues – piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Put them all together and they spelled mother, daughter, sister, wife – woman. Without them, no matter whether there was fame, achievement or wealth, all was ashes. With them, she was promised happiness and power.”1 Scholarship on this issue brings into focus some of the issues of class and reproduction women faced during the antebellum period. “The dominant image remains that of a middle-class housewife happily trading in agricultural labor alongside men for the joys of urban domesticity and childrearing.”2 The position a woman held in society in the antebellum period, North or South, was based largely upon her ability to fit within these narrow definitions of the True Woman and her expected roles. The concept of the True Woman was founded on four core principles – those of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity – and applied primarily to middle class Northern women. 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.”3 Welter ranked the hierarchy of these four core values in order of their social importance. The most important virtue was piety because it would lead to the others. “She would be another, better Eve, working in cooperation with the Redeemer, bringing the world back from its revolt and sin. The world would be reclaimed for God through her suffering.”4 Only a pure woman would be capable of attaining the true status of womanhood so purity was the second most important virtue for a woman to possess. “Without [purity] she was, in fact, no woman at all, but a member of some lower order … To contemplate the loss of purity brought tears; to be guilty of such a crime … brought madness or death.”5 However, purity had to be traded on the wedding night for something that became more important – submission. “Woman must preserve her virtue until marriage and marriage was necessary for her happiness. Yet, marriage was, literally, an end to innocence. She was told not to question this dilemma, but simply to accept it.”6 Through these three virtues, the woman was defined first as a pious and pure daughter and sister and then as a submissive wife within the confines of the male protector. This introduced the fourth dimension of the True Woman, her domesticity. Her prime motive following marriage was to provide for the hearth, meaning food, clothing, children and all that was necessary for the continuance of the family line. When it came to marriage and having children, it was said “Let no caprice or inconsistency on your part becloud a prospect so deservedly a subject of complacency to your friends and so full of promises of earthly good.”7 However, according to Stephanie McCurry, despite these emerging definitions of Womanhood found throughout the North, the role of women in the South didn’t differ very much after the war than they had been before the war, at least among the middle classes. “By childbirth and childraising, women reproduced the family for the next generation. By their physical labor, farm women produced household goods for which their counterparts in towns and cities were shopping in stores; the labor of farm women kept their families out of debt.”8 It was primarily because of the production of women within the home, McCurry says, that the South was able to separate itself from the North at all, making the Civil War possible, and the production of the women again that enabled the family to survive through the Reconstruction and later hardships. In the antebellum South, farm women were able to keep their families together and cared for through the sweat of their brow. They produced everything that could be produced at home, saving the family the need to purchase the product while also ensuring the family was not required to live without it. “Indeed, the continued high levels of household production throughout the antebellum period point to one local manifestation of the systematic difference between farm women’s work North and South. If yeoman farmers escaped relations of debt and dependency with local merchants and planters, they knew that the accomplishment was as much their wives’ as their own.”9 When produced in excess of the family’s need, the production efforts of the women could also be turned into cash on hand or bartered with other local farmers for necessities that could not be made in the home. Thus, although their labor was officially unnoticed, women in the south gained a certain degree of independence among their men because of the acknowledged partnership involved even as their products continued to be necessary for the betterment of the family. Farm women were also not the pampered gender class that is often depicted in films like “Gone with the Wind.” There is ample evidence that farm women of the south worked in the fields just as much as the men and the slaves. This was not work that came down to questions of class or gender but was instead a simple practicality. Farming operates on a time schedule based on weather conditions and natural growth cycles. It cannot be simply rescheduled or postponed until the farmer is able to hire enough help, purchase enough slaves or get around to doing everything himself. “Contemporaries of all classes were aware that the labor yeoman farmers commanded in the field included that of their wives and daughters; most yeomen simply did not own enough slaves to free female family members from field work.”10 They are contrasted with the daughters and wives of the planters, who were rarely, if ever, found in the fields and only then for inspection and not work. While the upper classes obviously valued a sharp division of labor among gender lines, the practicality of women’s contributions to the home and the independence and success secured thus prevented the kind of dependence of women on men exhibited in the ideals of the North. The North had its own contrast in the hundreds of women who went to work in the factories of the cities for a fraction of what men earned. Like the yeoman farmer’s wives, the salaries of these women, even given how small they were, often made the difference in the Northern family’s ability to avoid debt and still provide what was necessary for survival.11 Women in crowded urban settings did not have the resources to provide the same products from home as the Southern woman, but it was still the women of the North that were epitomized as the ultimate in feminine virtue because of their ability to remain in the home. The degree to which those who deviated from the accepted definition of a True Woman could expect to be accepted in polite society is illustrated again through the anomalies of the north. “A few women directly challenged the cult, for which they were excommunicated from polite society and relegated to the ‘lower orders’ occupied by ‘fallen women,’ female laborers, immigrants and slaves.”12 Although pious and domesticated ladies were hostages in the home, Hewitt suggests “they were not passively awaiting their liberator, but were instead cultivating the seeds of destruction that the cult of true womanhood itself had sown.”13 This came primarily from the position of women as the producers of the nation’s next generation. Whether North or South, the prime responsibility of women was to produce and raise children. However, childbirth was one of the most terrifying events of a woman’s life. Without very modern innovations in medicine, it still would be. Mortality rates for women were high and pain-relieving epidurals were many years from being developed. At the same time, there were no easy pills to take to prevent pregnancies as women were expected to produce. According to James Mohr, there was a significant decline in birth rates in the early nineteenth century particularly in urban areas where a high number of children did not necessarily equate to additional hands to help with the farm work. “In the mid-eighteenth century, the average rural woman could expect to face childbirth eight or nine times; by the early nineteenth century that number had dropped to six and in some urban areas to four.”14 The reason for this, according to Mohr, was through conscious choice on the part of the woman by marrying later in life and through abstinence. When this wasn’t successful and an unwanted pregnancy was discovered, women during this period in time would sometimes seek to abort. Because there were no laws against this, Mohr indicates the woman was generally not vilified as long as there had not been any stirrings of life yet. However, the women of the Southern farms, primarily those belonging to the yeoman farmers, had the prime responsibility of creating the next labor force. As is revealed by McCurry, it was frequently only through the necessities of childbirth that the wife was able to escape the labors of the fields.15 As can be seen through the discussion of this class of women during the antebellum period, the products of women were of prime importance in maintaining the success and independence of the household. This was true not only in their abilities to create products needed by the family and thus avoid having to purchase them, but also by producing excess that could be sold and in participating in the necessary field work on the farm. The more children she could bring into the world, the greater the possibility for the success of the farm as the children could also be put to work within a few years. At the same time, the birth of many sons would mean it was less necessary for women to work in the field (and therefore freed to be able to produce more goods in the house). As a result, the process of abortion came to be considered a crime against the family.16 This was because abortion removed the possibility for greater wealth through the products of the two hands of the child not born. To give the cause greater weight, issues of morality and religion were attached and abortion was made a crime in the legislative books, taking this important decision out of the hands of the woman and placing it again in the hands of the man. Throughout the antebellum period, women as well as men were redefining themselves based on the new economy and lifestyles they found themselves in. This was often dramatically different from North to South. While the idea of the Cult of True Womanhood developed in the North, essentially rendering the female gender powerless within the home, these ideals of a vulnerable woman were aspired to but not practical within the Southern home. Women might be pious, pure and submissive in the South, but their efforts were needed in the home as well as in the fields if the family was to survive. This provided them with a level of independence not enjoyed by the women of the North or even the planter’s wives of the South, but was not sufficient to enable them to escape the one true terror of life, the process of childbirth. The mortality rate for women in childbirth was very high and many women sought to avoid it too often by practicing abstinence or seeking abortions. While this was tacitly accepted in the North where more children meant more starvation and overcrowding in urban centers, it was seen as a crime in the South where more children meant more hands in the field and thus profit for the family group. While women of the North and upper classes lost power through their acceptance of the Cult of True Womanhood, the remaining women of the South lost control over their lives through the backbreaking work of keeping their families cared for and the legislative power of men over the bodies of their wives. References “Document: Working Conditions in Early Factories.” (1910). Cited in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. (2004). Linda K. Kerber & Jane Sherron De Hart (Eds.). Oxford University Press: 165-167. Hewitt, Nancy. (2002). “Taking the True Woman Hostage.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1: 156-62. McCurry, Stephanie. (2002). “Women’s Work: The Gender Division of Labor in Yeoman Households of South Carolina before the Civil War.” Cited in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. (2004). Linda K. Kerber & Jane Sherron De Hart (Eds.). Oxford University Press: 145-152. Mohr, James C. (1979). “Abortion in America.” Cited in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past. (2004). Linda K. Kerber & Jane Sherron De Hart (Eds.). Oxford University Press: 183-192. Roberts, Mary Louise. (Spring 2002). “True Woman Revisited.” Journal of Women’s History. Vol. 14, N. 1: 150-55. Sklar, Katherine. (1973). Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity. London, England: Yale University Press. Welter, Barbara. (1966). “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly. Vol. 18, N. 2, P. 1: 151-74. Read More