"Cult of True Womanhood" and American Catholic Sisters: An Example of Creative Subversion

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contributions of Catholic women religious to the complex and subversive process that Welter suggested. It analyzes the cultural and religious tensions that characterized nineteenth-century Catholic women’s education, as well as the women’s agency that, however inadvertently, it came to empower.

The New Versus True Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Ellen Glasgow’s Dare’s Gift

Given their opposition to Victorian conceptions of womanhood and domesticity, the literary works of Gilman and Glasgow have been a rallying point for women's emancipation and empowerment. Though the article touches upon several works by Gilman and Glasgow, it focuses particularly on the feminist viewpoints underpinning the transformation of female characters in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Glasgow’s Dare’s Gift from true to new women. The purpose of both tales, the article contends, is to question and deconstruct the dominant Victorian patriarchal cult of true womanhood, which has confined women to the domestic sphere and constrained their freedoms and liberties The theoretical foundation for the examination of the two stories is laid out in the Introduction, which contrastively explores the conflicting paradigms of new and true womanhoods. The Discussion delves into the many reactions to the characters' defiant behavior, as well as the phallocentric interpretation of it.

No, Really

This chapter examines Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), representative black domestic novels, the genre that 1980s and 1990s black feminism used to usher black women’s literature into the canon. Refusing to treat black domestic fiction as a response to black women’s exclusion from the cult of true womanhood, this chapter highlights the trope of homemade citizenship, which has been overlooked because readers assume artistic works either protest injustice or ignore the reasons for protest. Both novels revolve around racial uplift, and because they define it as collective practices of making-oneself-at-home, they highlight the importance of the community conversation to help black women claim their right to every aspect of success, including romantic love. [121 of 125 words]

"A Jewish Maestra and a Lady too": Reflections on Femininity in the Career of Ethel Stark

Ethel Stark (1910–2012) was one of the most important conductors and concert violinists in Canada in the Twentieth century. This article highlights how an Austro-Canadian Jewish woman who lived outside the constraints of conventional domesticity, both navigated through and defied the ideals of the “Cult of True Womanhood” and spearheads a movement of feminism in music. I argue that Stark’s exposure to Jewish cultural traditions of social justice and womanhood in her childhood formed a critical dimension of her feminist activism later in her life, and in particular in the founding of The Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra (1940).

(Un)Dress in Southworth & Hawes’ Daguerreotype Portraits: Clytie, Proserpine, and Antebellum Boston Women

Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes (2005) is a monumental exhibition catalogue showcasing the work of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes. Together the partners established a renowned daguerreotype studio in mid-nineteenth-century Boston that catered to the city’s bourgeoisie. This paper seeks to unravel the mystery of dozens of daguerreotypes found in Young America, in which elite Boston women appear to be nearly nude. The unidentified women stand in stark contrast to the carefully concealed bodies of Southworth & Hawes’ other female subjects. Why would they expose themselves in such a manner before the camera’s lens? This paper attributes the women’s state of (un)dress to their deliberate emulation of two sculptures in the classical tradition: Clytie, a marble bust dating to antiquity, and Proserpine, a mid-nineteenth-century marble bust by American neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers. This argument first reveals how a general “classical statue” aesthetic prevailed for women’s deportment in antebellum America, then demonstrates that the busts of Clytie and Proserpine had special significance as icons of white, elite female beauty in the period. Next, this paper makes the case that Southworth & Hawes devised a special style of photography deriving from their own daguerreotypes of the two statues, in which the women’s off-shoulder drapery was deliberately obscured allowing their female clientele to pose in the guise of these famous statues. The paper concludes by arguing that the women shown in these images could pose in this style without contravening societal norms, as these mythological figures were construed by women and men in the period to reflect the central precepts of the mid-nineteenth-century “Cult of True Womanhood.” Moreover, the busts offered sartorial models that reinforced standards of female dress as they related to class and privilege. By baring their flawless, white skin, however, the women positioned themselves at the crux of contentious beliefs about race in a deeply divided nation prior to the American Civil War.

Moral and Manners of Flappers (New Woman) in F. Scott Fitzgerald Works

Flapper's phenomenon appeared in the 1920s in line with the feminist achievement on women's suffrage. Industrialism opened the possibility for vistas of young American generations at that time to undergo a good member of changes both in moral and manners. The characteristics of flappers are reflected in literary works by Fitzgerald, an American famous novelist. In achieving the objective of this research, a qualitative method is applied by the way of library research - collecting data from both primary and secondary sources. The former, This Side of Paradise (1919), a novel telling about the young generation, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender is The Night, both describing the maturity of the flappers. The outcome of the research proves that there is a similarity, in moral and manners, between the flappers in Fitzgerald's fictions and those in reality during the 1920s. The new values differed from the old ones which were maintained by the cult of true womanhood, especially in concern with those young generations performances, manners, and morals. The media encouraged the development of the new values. There is also a sense of paradox: on one hand Fitzgerald implicitly tended to spread out the moral and manners of flappers, but on the other hand, he criticizes them.

The Home and the Asylum. Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century medico-psychological theories.