More of this Feature • Part 1

Related Resources • 19th Century Lives • Midwives

Books Reviewed • Thatcher, Laurel Ulrich. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. • Dudden, Faye. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America. Out of Print.

Elsewhere on the Web • Beecher: Treatise

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In the mid-nineteenth century, at the same time American industrialization grew, new and higher standards for women appeared. Historian Barbara Welter authored a path breaking article, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860," which originally appeared in American Quarterly in 1966. In her study Welter identifies four characteristics that a True Woman should have exhibited and mastered with ease: domesticity, piety, purity, and submissiveness. The Cult of True Womanhood (also known as Cult of Domesticity) was an ideal placed upon nineteenth women of how they should conduct their lives. The Cult of True Womanhood is a phrase that has since come into regular usage in historical studies of this time, and refers to the ideology of a woman's place in society (in the home).

However, the Cult of True Womanhood did not seem to apply to working class women. In fact in Serving Women, Faye Dudden contends that it was largely due to the increased availability of working class domestic servants, that middle and upper class women had the leisure to pursue true womanhood. An important point that Dudden makes is the divide between classes, race, and ethnicity. Young women, like those that helped Martha Ballard in Laurel Ulrich Thatcher's A Midwife's Tale, were generally considered to be in the same social strata as their employers. However, as mill jobs opened up many of the women that would have been help earlier in the century preferred urban, waged, non-domestic work. Therefore, women that would not have been help, such as blacks or Irish, became hired servants. Even though domestic servants were often hired to live in the house of their employer, they did not have meals with their employer. They were not treated as part of a large extended family as help was. Also, they were hired to do specific tasks, which the lady of the house might have overseen, but not shared in the work. The relationship between the lady of the house and domestic help had shifted. With the growth of industrial jobs to attract the young, single, middle class white women and an increase in immigration, a strict distinction between employer and employee emerged. Dudden is compelling in her argument that need for hired servants was perpetuated by and in turn shaped the Cult of True Womanhood.

Both Ulrich and Dudden's books are highly acclaimed, and more importantly, they are immensely readable. My brief reviews of their works are not meant to be comprehensive but rather a starting point. With any luck I have raised more questions than I have answered and you will be motivated to read more about women's lives in nineteenth century America.

- Erina Moriarty

Books reviewed:

Dudden, Faye. Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth Century America. Wesleyan University Press (1983, out-of-print).

Thatcher, Laurel Ulrich. A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Vintage Books (June 1991, paperback reprint edition).

Also recommended:

Beecher, Catherine and Harriet Beecher Stowe. American Women's Home: A Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian Homes - the nineteenth century women's domestic bible. See related

Diner, Hasia. Erin's Daughters in America: Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press (January 1984, paperback). ISBN 0801828724. (compare prices) Contains an extensive discussion of Irish immigrants as domestic servants.

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