Women in the 1800s
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Introduction:
Despite the growth of industry, urban centers and immigration, America in the late 19th century was still predominantly rural. Seven out of ten people in the United States lived in small towns with populations under 2500 or on farms in 1870. In Indiana, the 1880 census reported a population of almost 2 million residents, about 55 per square mile, 1,010,000 men and 968,000 woman. About three out of four people lived in rural areas. Although much of the study done on womans roles during this period looks at the roles of the emerging urban middle class or those of immigrant women, the changes that occurred affected rural women, too.
The “Cult of Domesticity, ” first named and identified in the early part of the century, was solidly entrenched by late nineteenth century, especially in rural environments. The beliefs embodied in this ÐCult gave women a central, if outwardly passive, role in the family. Womens God-given role, it stated, was as wife and mother, keeper of the household, guardian of the moral purity of all who lived therein. The Victorian home was to be a haven of comfort and quiet, sheltered from the harsh realities of the working world. Housework took on a scientific quality, efficiency being the watchword. Children were to be cherished and nurtured. Morality was protected through the promulgation of Protestant beliefs and social protest against alcohol, poverty and the decay of urban living.
Pulling against these traditions was the sense of urgency, movement and progress so evident in the geographical, industrial, technological and political changes affecting the country. Womens roles were meant to steady all this uncertainty, but women could not help but see opportunities for themselves in this growth. Jobs opened up in factories, retail establishments and offices, giving single women new options. Education became mandatory for both genders in many states. Women sought higher education, too, first in all female institutions and then in co-ed environments. The push for womens rights, with suffrage in the forefront, also gathered momentum. Regardless of these changes, throughout the nineteenth century, 95% of married women remained “at home.”
The proliferation of popular literature and the expansion of communications through the press and other means could not have helped but enlighten rural women to the opportunities opening up for their gender. Their lives, however, were tied to house and children, endlessly unacknowledged work, little opportunity for outside contact or variety of experience, and little relief from everyday triviality. The extent to which farm women felt any fulfillment or larger meaning may indeed have been tied to how well they could balance the tensions between the expectations of the culture and the day-to-day, unrelenting tasks of housekeeping, child rearing and farm life.
Keeping the Home
” A really good housekeeper is almost always unhappy. While she does so much for the comfort of others, she nearly ruins her own health and life. It is because she cannot be easy and comfortable when there is the least disorder or dirt to be seen.” The Household, January 1884
“some one said that womans best work is that which is unseen by mortal eyethat this work is the steady uplifting and upholding of a higher standard of living; it is the reaching forward and upward, both for ourselves and others, towards a loftier life Yes, it is hard. But, sisters, it is work that belongs to us. It is work that, if not done by us, will never be done at all. For man cannot do it – as far as the family is concernedFor as a rule, and it is a rule that has few exceptions, woman creates the atmosphere of the home.” Mrs. Julia C.R. Dorr, The Household, Vol. V, 1872
Womens popular literature of the period is full of advice about and encouragement for proper housekeeping. Implicit in this advice is the notion that by keeping a clean, neat, pious home and filling it with warmth and inviting smells, women are achieving their highest calling. The movement to elevate the status of housework found an early voice in the writings of Catherine Beecher. Beecher devoted much effort to glorifying housekeepingand attempting to convince her readers that their daily duties, however tedious or distressing, constituted important works assigned to them by Nature and God. Beecher was one of the early proponents of Ðscientific housekeeping, believing that a good housekeeper should be a jack-of-all-sciences, and use those sciences to run the household efficiently. She went so far as to suggest a explicit weekly schedules and rational designs for the kitchen and cooking areas. Her many manuals and cookbooks offered not only a philosophy for housekeeping, but practical methods for accomplishing those philosophical ends.
A review of the popular literature of the time provides unique insights into the expectations for womens lives and the realities of their existence. In his book, So Sweet to Labor, author Norton Juster looked at the advice given and the responses received in a few publications of the time. He notes that the term Ðdrudgery appears again and again as a descriptive term. Women wrote letters that described the endless, repetitive work undertaken week by week. Not that it was all woe – many reported about the joys of fulfilling their womanly role as keeper of the house, or wrote to chastise their complaining sisters.
The weekly schedule of “drudge” likely included laundry on Monday, ironing and mending on Tuesday, baking on Wednesday and Saturday, daily tidying of kitchen and parlor, and thorough cleaning on Thursday and again on Saturday. This was in addition to childcare, three meals a day, hauling water and keeping the fire burning in the stove, a chore that in itself took at least one hour each day. Then there was making the family garments and seasonal preserving of fruits, vegetables and meat. Often, too, the scope of work extended to the farm itself. Women had charge of the farm garden, livestock and poultry and work related to “civilizing” the farm. During planting and harvest, if she did not work in the fields herself, she provided room and board for the extra help that did.
It is evident from the conflicting opinions offered in literature of the period that womens lives were fraught with tensions. How-to manuals, magazine and newspaper articles set high, if not impossible, standards for moral rectitude, cleanliness and cheerfulness. The realities posed by the sheer number of tasks to be completed daily, monthly and yearly stressed even the hardiest