The Cult of True Womanhood

The Cult of True Womanhood

What was the Cult of True Womanhood?

• It was a new ideal of womanhood arising from women’s magazines, advice books, popular culture, etc.

Arose from New Middle Class Post-Industrial Family

• 19th-Century middle class family did not need to be self-sufficient– Men worked producing goods and services

while wives and children stayed home– The public world too rough for women, who

were weak and delicate and should stay home;

– The family became insulated, with kin & community lessening in importance

Ideal of Womanhood

• Piety• Purity• Submissiveness• Domesticity

Piety

• Belief that women had a inclination for religion;

• Woman is the new Eve, working with God to save the world through her pure, passionless love.

Purity

• Her greatest treasure– Once married, she has no legal or emotional

existence

Submissiveness• Women to be passive,

submissive to fate, duty, God and men;

• Clothing emphasized passivity– Corsets closed off lungs

and pinched inner organs

– Large numbers of undergarments and weight of dresses limited mobility

– “A really sensible woman feels her dependence. She does what she can, but she is conscious of her inferiority and therefore grateful for support.”

Domesticity

• Housework is an uplifting task– Needlework and crafts

approved duties;

• Women make the home a refuge for men so that they can escape from the immoral world of business and industry

Scientific Sexism• Women are “physically

inferior”:– Physically smaller than

men– Less stamina—they faint

more– They menstruate and

are physically incapacitated every month

• Brought on “temporary insanity”

– More delicate - female nervous system more prone to fatigue because of the reproductive system

Scientific Sexism

• "It was as if the Almighty, in creating the female sex, had taken the uterus and built up a woman around it."

• Reflex irritation: any imbalance, infection, or fatigue would cause a reaction elsewhere in the body.

• If a woman was sick anywhere, it was assumed that the problem originated in the reproductive system.

Scientific Sexism

• Women are “intellectually inferior”– Smaller brains than men

• Size of brain to body weight– Abandoned when it was discovered that

female brain to body rate yielded a higher ratio

• Brain weight to body height

– Female brain inferior and more primitive than male brain• Phrenology—the art of reading the skull

Scientific Sexism

• Women: Puberty to Menopause– Women must channel their energies into

reproduction• Discouraged from intellectual activity b/c blood

was needed for reproductive organ development• Education took about 20% of women’s vital

energy• Pregnant women must not strain brains or the

unborn child would be harmed• Avoid strong emotions

Works Cited

• http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/386/truewoman.html;

• Most illustrations from Godey’s Ladies’ Book