Toward an Intellectual History of Women by Linda K. Kerber

Author:Linda K. Kerber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

Authorities promoted the ideology of domesticity and separate spheres to southern blacks, even when most still lived in slave cabins. Reproduced from Clinton B. Fisk, Plain Counsel for the Freedmen (1866). Courtesy Library of Congress.

Black families were not immune to the ideology of separate spheres, and recent work by James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Dorothy Sterling, Jacqueline Jones, and Deborah Gray White has been particularly shrewd in tracing their ambivalent responses to it.30 The American ideology was to some limited extent congruent with African traditions of matrilocality, of women’s clear responsibilities for child support and child raising, and of a sex-linked division for child support and child raising, and of a sex-linked division of labor. Enslaved men lacked the economic power that white men exercised over their families; the nuances of relationships between slave men and women are debated by historians. It is clear that directly after the Civil War, prescriptive literature addressed to recently freed slaves, people living in hovels with dirt floors, counseled delicacy among women and a clear division of their work from men’s work, implicitly promising that adoption of the ideology would ensure elevation to the middle class.31

The ideology of separate spheres could be both instrumental and prescriptive; its double character has made it difficult for historians to work with. In the first mode, it was an ideology women found useful and emotionally sustaining, a familiar link between the older patriarchal culture and the new bourgeois experience. This aspect could be particularly welcome as a hedge against secularization; religious women of virtually all persuasions sustained a pattern of separateness both in their religious activism and in their own religiosity.32 It could also, as Gerda Lerner discerned, protect the interests of one class of women in a time of change. But in its prescriptive mode, the ideology of separate spheres required constant attention if it were to be maintained.

In Beyond Separate Spheres, Rosalind Rosenberg has located the beginnings of modern studies of sex differences in the Progressive Era. Two generations of brilliant social scientists, among them Helen Thompson, Jessie Taft, W. I. Thomas, Franz Boas, and Elsie Clews Parsons, established the foundation for a “fundamental shift that took place in the way women viewed themselves and their place in society.” By the early twentieth century at least some psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists were coming to understand that many sex differences were the result of socialization, not biology. Finally it became possible to imagine a culture that was not divided into separate spheres. Our own ideas about sex differences still rely heavily on their work.33

Yet the real world took its time catching up with what academics believed they knew. Quite as much energy, male and female, has gone to maintain boundaries as to break them down. One result of the traditional assumption that what women have done is trivial is that historians have severely underestimated the extent of the energy—psychological, political, and legal—thus expended. Writing of rural communities in the nineteenth-century Midwest, John Mack Faragher describes

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