Tocqueville was particularly struck by the character of the family. Americans, he wrote, showed an “equal regard” for husbands and wives, but defined their roles differently. This was made possible by the growth of the market economy, which undermined the importance of home and family as the unit of economic production. More and more people did their work in shops, in offices, or on factory floors. Whether a job was skilled or unskilled, white-collar or blue-collar, or strictly professional, it took the family breadwinner out of the house during working
Lilly 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.
Affairs, 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 doctrine 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 possibly 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 A
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 certainly 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.
World History
