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The UK Bible Students Website History Corner |
The Changing Role Of Women In 19th-Century America
‘Send Us a Lady Physician’:
Women Doctors In America 1835-1920, ed. Ruth J. Abram
(New York: W.W. Norton & Co.; 1985), pp. 61, 62.
[American spellings and punctuation retained.]
‘[T]here were . . . changes taking place in the social definition of woman’s role in the nineteenth century that made more and more middle-class women comfortable with the idea of studying medicine.
The onset of industrialization brought about important alterations in the organization of work and family life.
The separation of home and work reduced the father’s role in domestic life while the mother and children found themselves alone in the household.
Accompanying these social and economic changes was an elaborate ideology based on the idea of separate spheres for men and women.
The world of men was considered “public,” the world of women “private.” Of course, this new ideology of domesticity, on the surface at least, merely reaffirmed woman’s traditional connection with the private sphere. In theory, there was really nothing terribly new about a limited and sex-specific role for women in the home.
But in reality, the ideology of domesticity contained within it kernels of radical change. As many recent historians have not hesitated to point out, it gave women extraordinary new power in the private sphere. The ideology of domesticity romanticized both the family and woman's role within it.
As Americans were forced increasingly to cope with the problems of industrialization in the nineteenth century, the family became for them a kind of ideological touchstone for all that was good, beautiful, and true. Gradually women, now defined as the moral and spiritual center of that family, were given a central role in the preservation of values that were intended to inform the institutions of society at large.
Woman’s role was suddenly invested with cosmic moral significance. When emphasis was placed on the socially transforming aspects of woman’s role in the home, the results proved revolutionary. Middle-class women could and very soon . . . did use their newly gained power over domestic life to establish a base for self-assertion in the public sphere.
Making the home a model for social interaction, they played an unprecedented part in what became the reformist critique of industrializing America.
While the ideology of domesticity could be used by social conservatives to keep women in the home, in reality it was used just as powerfully by feminists to push for the widest possible definition of woman’s sphere.
Many middle-class women who took their moral and social role seriously understood from the very beginning that to purify society, some women might indeed have to enter it.’
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