A School for Wives

Abstract

This chapter shows how domestic servitude had been the practical basis upon which elite U.S. womanhood was defined. There had been efforts throughout the nineteenth century to ennoble housekeeping and to call attention to its social value, especially in popular books like Lydia Maria Child's 1829 The American Frugal Housewife or Catharine Beecher's 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy. Yet even as some nineteenth-century Americans had exalted women's moral and managerial oversight of the domestic sphere, they generally deemphasized the physical work that went into housekeeping. If the wife was to make the home a haven, the husband should not observe her toiling, if possible. The labor that went into producing middle-class homes was supposed to be done with discretion, ideally by servants or slaves.