The Family Recast 271affairs, they were expected to tend only to those affairs.
Expanding their interest to other fields of human
endeavor was frowned on. Where the typical wife had
formerly been a partner in a family enterprise, she now
left earning a living entirely to her husband. She was
certainly not encouraged to have an independent career
as, say, a lawyer or doctor. Time spent away from home
or devoted to matters unrelated to the care of husband
and family was, according to the new normative doc-
trine of “separate spheres,” time misappropriated.
This trend widened the gap between the middle
and lower classes. For a middle-class wife and mother
to take a job or, still worse, to devote herself to any
“frivolous” activity outside the home was considered
a dereliction of duty. Such an attitude could not pos-
sibly develop in lower-class families where everyone
had to work simply to keep food on the table.
Some women objected to the Cult of True
Womanhood: By placing an ideal on so high a
pedestal, all real women would fall short. Others
escaped its more suffocating aspects by forming
close friendships with other women. But most
women, including such forceful proponents of
women’s rights as Hale and the educator Catharine
Beecher, subscribed to the view that a woman’s
place was in the home. “The formation of the moral
and intellectual character of the young is committed
mainly to the female hand,” Beecher wrote in ALilly Martin Spencer’s Young Husband: First Marketing(1854). Note
that passers-by are amused at this husband’s inept attempt to do
“women’s work.”
Source:Young Husband: First Marketing, 1854 by Lilly Martin Spencer. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright © The
Metropolitan Museum of Art.
hours six days a week. This did not mean that the
family necessarily ceased to be an economic unit.
But the labor of the father and any children with
jobs came home in the form of cash, thus at least
initially in the custody of the individual earners. The
social consequences of this change were enormous
for the traditional “head of the family” and for his
wife and children.
Because he was away so much, the husband had
to surrender to his wife some of the power in the
family that he had formerly exercised, if for no other
reason than the fact that she was always there. Noah
Webster explained that the ideal father’s authority
was “like the mild dominion of a limited monarch,
and not the iron rule of an austere tyrant.” It cer-
tainly explains why Tocqueville concluded that “a
sort of equality reigns around the domestic hearth”
in America. Fredericka Bremer, a Swedish feminist
and novelist who visited the United States in the
1840s, went even further; she described American
women as “the center and lawgiver in the home.”
The new power and prestige that wives and
mothers enjoyed were not obtained without cost. Since
they were exercising day-to-day control over household
A middle-class urban family in 1852: The surroundings are genteel—
a well-furnished parlor with piano—with all of the teenaged
children “working” at improving themselves through culturally
elevating activities.