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The cult of true womanhood, a code of beliefs which emphasized a woman's piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, has been described as the ideological lynchpin defining nineteenth-century American women's lives. Despite evidence suggesting this model may not accurately describe the actual behavior of women, most scholars maintain that the notion of true womanhood did function prescriptively, as an ideal toward which women should strive. Second, much scholarship embodies the belief that men and women lived in a bifurcated world in which feelings and behavior were strictly circumscribed along gender lines. Derived in part from the presumed impact of economic changes taking place in Jacksonian America, it has been argued that men were compelled to live more publicly and less domestically and as a result abdicated their central role in the household. Women, who filled the sinecure abandoned by men, became the guardians of home and family but were generally characterized as passive respondents in all other areas of life. Whether this transformation represented progress or regress for women has been the subject of a lively debate; yet inherent within virtually every study is a tacit acceptance of true womanhood as a prescriptive ideal. This study constructs a framework to test the pervasiveness of true womanhood attributes in novels and stories published between 1820 and the Civil War. Significantly, male authors were equally represented in the sample of 120 tales. Each story was analyzed systematically and with the aid of the computer, the frequency of true womanhood concepts were measured and changes over time were charted. A second sample tested 314 women characters in order to compare and contrast masculine and feminine perceptions of womanhood. Most of the standard theories about the ideal woman are either modified or contradicted outright. The most important findings to emerge from this study, however, concerned the similarities in beliefs between male and female authors. Despite some nuances, writers of both sexes shared similar attitudes not only about womanhood but about manhood as well; and a series of Multiple Classification Analyses confirmed these discoveries. The attitudes which scholars have attributed solely to literary women of this period may instead be a phenomenon derived from a shared culture in which gender was a minor influence. |
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