Women, too, found many of the opportunities opened by the market revolution closed to them. As the household declined as a center of economic production, many women saw their traditional roles undermined by the availability of mass-produced goods previously made at home. Some women, as noted above, followed work as it moved from household to factory. Others embraced a new definition of femininity, which glorified not a woman’s contribution to the family’s economic well-being, but her ability to create a private environment shielded from the competitive tensions of the market economy. Woman’s “place” was in the home, a site increasingly emptied of economically productive functions as work moved from the household to workshops and factories. Her role was to sustain nonmarket values like love, friendship, and mutual obligation, providing men with a shelter from the competitive marketplace.
The earlier ideology of “republican motherhood,” which allowed women a kind of public role as mothers of future citizens, subtly evolved into the mid-nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity.” “Virtue,” which in the eighteenth century was a political characteristic of men essential to the success of republican government, came to be redefined as a personal moral quality associated more and more closely with women. “Virtue” for a woman meant not only sexual innocence but beauty, frailty, and dependence on men. “In whatever situation of life a woman is placed from her cradle to her grave,” declared The Young Lady’s Book, one of numerous popular magazines addressed to female audiences of the 1820s and 1830s, “a spirit of obedience and submission, pliability of temper, and humility of mind, are required from her.” These magazines carried articles such as “Woman, a Source of Comfort,” “Woman, a Being to Come Home To,” and “Woman—Man’s Best Friend.”
A woman with a sewing machine, in an undated photograph. It is not clear if she is sewing for herself and family, or for income as a seamstress.
With more and more men leaving the home for work, women did exercise considerable power over personal affairs within the family. The rapid decline in the American birthrate during the nineteenth century (from an average of seven children per woman in 1800 to four in 1900) cannot be explained except by the conscious decision of millions of women to limit the number of children they bore. But the idea of domesticity minimized women’s even indirect participation in the outside world. For both sexes, freedom meant fulfilling their respective “inborn” qualities. Men were rational, aggressive, and domineering, while women were nurturing, selfless, ruled by the emotions, and thus less fitted for public life. If submission to the will of another increasingly seemed inadmissible for free men, it remained a condition natural to women and expected of them. Men moved freely between the public and private “spheres”; women were supposed to remain cloistered in the private realm of the family.