Domesticity

A component of the English patriarchal system that evolved in response to the Protestant Reformation, domesticity describes the female role in the gender division of labor within the family. Puritans in particular empowered the family patriarch as the unquestioned authority and established rigid roles for women that they hoped would provide stability, continuity, and order to their lives. Although wives were considered a “necessary good,” women were thought to be inferior to men and given a diminished social position that limited their influence to the private sphere of the home. English colonists, seeking comfort and familiarity, attempted to bring “civilization” to the “wilderness” by replicating their Old World duties and lives in the New World. Circumstances in the colonies, however, led to a broader definition of domestic life in many regions, as colonists were obliged to adapt their values to new conditions. Consequently, colonial domesticity differed significantly from either the English model or the more narrowly defined 19th-century “domestic feminism.”

Enforced by law and reinforced by religion, domesticity was the main institution in a woman’s life, and the home was a refuge of English custom. Married women had no independent legal rights and were subordinate to their husbands. In the family they were expected to perform both productive and reproductive domestic duties. Their household responsibilities included cooking, cleaning, sewing, weaving, candle-making, butchering, tending a kitchen garden, caring for poultry, and performing dairy work. They spent much of their adult lives in the cycle of pregnancy, birth, and nursing while simultaneously raising older children and executing domestic duties. Mothers passed on “huswife” skills to their daughters, creating strong mother-daughter bonds. Wealthy women also managed servants and slaves.

Because of the scarcity of utensils and tools such as washtubs and candlemolds, housework was more difficult for American than for English women. For the first few generations in the New World, the domestic sphere was often more broadly defined than it had been in England. Domestic products contributed significantly to family welfare and prosperity, and thus many housewives were able to ply their managerial and technical skills and had a relationship with the working world. In New England Puritan “goodwives” submitted both to God’s and their husbands’ wills. The model housewife was compared to a tortoise confined to her shell—a secure and stable domestic world. Seventeenth-century Chesapeake families, on the other hand, were often disrupted by a shortage of women, death, remarriage, and divided loyalties. Patriarchal power was, to a greater extent, shared with widows’ inherited power, and labor was too scarce to maintain the English gendered division of labor. Women worked the fields rarely but when necessary, and they frequently turned a profit from household production, such as spinning, weaving, and churning. Chesapeake women were probably less submissive than their Puritan counterparts, although their family futures and fortunes were less secure.

By the early 18th century the evolution of a colonial aristocracy with inherited land and power strengthened domestic patriarchalism among the affluent. White women, equating their domestic lifestyle with civilization and prosperity, believed they were elevated above both slave women, who were employed alongside men, and Native American women, whom they considered to be overworked. Euro-Americans viewed domestic patriarchy as the only civilized family arrangement and perpetuated the system by imposing it on slave and Native American families.

Further reading: Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).

—Deborah C. Taylor