Beyond the Boundaries

Abstract

'Shall I Fetter Her Will?': Literary Americans Confront Feminine Submission begins with an interpretation of antebellum gender relations that divides world into public and private, masculine and feminine, assertive and passive. Men, according this system of social markers and meanings, had all world's power. They were the movers, doers, actors. In performing a quintessential femininity, women were men's opposite. Denied authority and autonomy, they were submissive responders. If this interpretation sounds familiar, it should. Laura McCall has culled illustrative quotations from Barbara Welter's landmark of True Womanhood: 1820-1860. Although Julie Roy Jeffrey does not cite Welter directly, Permeable Boundaries: Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres takes her conclusions as a point of departure (and, as with McCall, as a point of opposition). Published in American Quarterly in Summer of 1966, Welter's article on nineteenth-century America's ideology of womanhood has had an enormous impact. In closely affiliated fields of American women's history and American women's literature, many scholars, at least until recently, have agreed that antebellum women were held hostage four behavioral tenets that Welter posited-piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity.1 In decades following its publication, of True seemed be everywhere. subject of a special session at American Studies Association meeting in 1977, article was also reprinted in a host of collections. The Cult of True appeared in Ronald Hogeland's widely read Women and Womanhood in America, published in 1973. Welter herself reprinted it in Dimity Convictions: American Woman in Nineteenth Century, collection of her essays issued a decade after article appeared in American Quarterly. Mary Beth Norton included it in Major Problems in American Women's History, a collection of essays and documents that has been used in classrooms across nation since its publication in 1989. More recently, John R. M. Wilson made The Cult of True central Forging American Character, interdisciplinary collection he edited for Prentice-Hall in 1991. Barbara Welter's of True Womanhood, 1820-1860 has also been widely cited in historical and literary scholarship on nineteenth-century women, white and black. During 1970s, Welter's paradigm served as a point of departure for Kathryn Kish Sklar and Nancy Cott, both of whom influenced much of subsequent scholarship in American women's history. Published in 1974, Sklar's pathbreaking Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity highlighted compromise that Beecher told white women strike with their male counterparts: if they agreed restrict their participation in larger society, they could have control of domestic sphere. Welter's womanhood demonstrated widespread popularity of this bargain by 1840s, Sklar told readers. Nancy Cott's Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 17801835 opened with an acknowledgment Welter. When she began pursue her research on New England women, Cott told readers that she had wanted understand how Welter's womanhood related women's actual circumstances, experiences, and consciousness. She had turned women's letters, diaries, and journals and looked decades before 1830 to find out what had happened that might clarify reception of or need for a `cult.' Fifteen years after publication of Bonds of Womanhood in 1977, Jo Anne Preston embarked on a similar project in an article that she published in New England Quarterly. Preston had wanted understand impact of Welter's womanhood on New England women's entry into profession of teaching.2 Literary critics, most notably those who focused on antebellum narratives of black women, have begun with Welter's of True Womanhood. …