Ellen Carol Dubois and Lynn Dumenil’s “Pedestal, Loom, and Auction Block” from Through Women’s Eyes
In chapter four of Through Women’s Eyes, the authors give an historical account of women’s lives in antebellum America, comparing and contrasting the experiences of Northern and Southern women. During this period women’s lives were heavily influenced by their positions either within or outside of the sphere/boundaries of acceptable womanhood, the first wave of American industrialization, and their relationship to the institution of slavery, as slaves, abolitionists, or as beneficiaries of the system.
Dubois and Dumenil recognize the “cult of true womanhood/domesticity” as an ideology of absolutely opposing gender roles that divided men and women in terms of family life, public life, religious expression, and work experiences. Housewifery and childrearing were seen as women’s natural state, and the authors argue that the supposed success of American democracy depended on motherhood and maternal selflessness. The feminization of the teaching profession was a result of women being cheaper to hire than men, and also because of their expansive maternity for which they were regarded as better suited to teach children. A wave of religious revivals (the Second Great Awakening) in the early 19th century contributed to the identification of women with Christian piety, which in turn enhanced women’s public lives through churchgoing, volunteering, and missionary excursions. The effect of the burgeoning market economy during this period was a decline in the economic value of middle class women’s domestic household production but an increase in the moral significance of the domestic sphere.
Conversely, slave women of the American south had a very different experience of womanhood than northern white women. They had no true households to manage, and distinctions between public and private, and work and family did not feature much at all in their lives. Wealthy women shifted their maternal duties onto their slaves, which left both groups detached from the process of motherhood. The “southern white feminine ideal” of elite white women was expressive of similar ideas about womanhood as in the northern conception of it, except in the south, white women’s purity and selflessness was “defined in contrast to the condition of black slave women.” Northern white women were praised for their “industrious domesticity,” while white southern women were not supposed to engage in any actual labor, lest they be brought to the level of the slaves. Marriage in both regions prohibited white women from property ownership, while black women were not allowed to have their marriages even legally recognized. Slave women were so far removed from generalizations of true womanhood that it is plain to see that they were “excluded from the category of ‘woman’ altogether.”
The rise of factory production in the north made it possible for women to earn wages as individuals, even though they were paid less than men for tasks that were considered less skilled. Women who labored as domestic servants for middle-class mistresses were a rung above women who comprised the urban poor, who were seen as the absolute antithesis of true womanhood—unable to find meaningful work, husbands, or childcare. Bearing this in mind, the personal freedoms afforded to all white women regardless of their economic status, including living with their own families, moving about, education, and general freedom, did not exist for black slave women.
The limited sphere of acceptable womanhood was limited even further depending on a woman’s race, economic status, and social class. Dubois and Dumenil accurately depict how variations in these factors determined the quality of life for women in America in the years leading up to the Civil War.
-Nina Taylor