People's History of the United States_ 1492 to Present, A - Zinn, Howard [67]
There was complex movement in different directions. Now, women were being pulled out of the house and into industrial life, while at the same time there was pressure for women to stay home where they were more easily controlled. The outside world, breaking into the solid cubicle of the home, created fears and tensions in the dominant male world, and brought forth ideological controls to replace the loosening family controls: the idea of “the woman’s place,” promulgated by men, was accepted by many women.
As the economy developed, men dominated as mechanics and tradesmen, and aggressiveness became more and more defined as a male trait. Women, perhaps precisely because more of them were moving into the dangerous world outside, were told to be passive. Clothing styles developed—for the rich and middle class of course, but, as always, there was the imitation of style even for the poor—in which the weight of women’s clothes, corsets and petticoats, emphasized female separation from the world of activity.
It became important to develop a set of ideas, taught in church, in school, and in the family, to keep women in their place even as that place became more and more unsettled. Barbara Welter (Dimity Convictions) has shown how powerful was the “cult of true womanhood” in the years after 1820. The woman was expected to be pious. A man writing in The Ladies’ Repository: “Religion is exactly what a woman needs, for it gives her that dignity that bests suits her dependence.” Mrs. John Sandford, in her book Woman, in Her Social and Domestic Character, said: “Religion is just what woman needs. Without it she is ever restless or unhappy.”
Sexual purity was to be the special virtue of a woman. It was assumed that men, as a matter of biological nature, would sin, but woman must not surrender. As one male author said: “If you do, you will be left in silent sadness to bewail your credulity, imbecility, duplicity, and premature prostitution.” A woman wrote that females would get into trouble if they were “high spirited not prudent.”
The role began early, with adolescence. Obedience prepared the girl for submission to the first proper mate. Barbara Welter describes this:
The assumption is twofold: the American female was supposed to be so infinitely lovable and provocative that a healthy male could barely control himself when in the same room with her, and the same girl, as she “comes out” of the cocoon of her family’s protectiveness, is so palpitating with undirected affection, so filled to the brim with tender feelings, that she fixes her love on the first person she sees. She awakes from the midsummer night’s dream of adolescence, and it is the responsibility of her family and society to see that her eyes fall on a suitable match and not some clown with the head of an ass. They do their part by such restrictive measures as segregated (by sex and/or class) schools, dancing classes, travel, and other external controls. She is required to exert the inner control of obedience. The combination forms a kind of societal chastity belt which is not unlocked until the marriage partner has arrived, and adolescence is formally over.
When Amelia Bloomer in 1851 suggested in her feminist publication that women wear a kind of short skirt and pants, to free themselves from the encumbrances of traditional dress, this was attacked in the popular women’s literature. One story has a girl admiring the “bloomer” costume, but her professor admonishes her that they are “only one of the many manifestations of that wild spirit of socialism and agrarian radicalism which is at present so rife in our land.”
In The Young Lady’s Book of 1830: “. . . in whatever