DOMESTICITY
The home was the prime location for the expression of femininity in the nineteenth century. In the domestic sphere, womanliness could flourish, a
woman could express her true vocation.
For the wives of the industrial entrepreneurs of northern France described by Bonnie Smith, ‘home, cosmos and society constituted a tripartite axis of the domestic vision'.4 Domesticity for these bourgeois women was a way of life entirely separate from the world of business and politics inhabited by their husbands. Reproduction rather than production was the focus of their world. The notion of separate spheres as it was lived in the early industrial period was a cultural form which expressed the mentalite of a distinct social group whose world view was focused on the domestic, on a private world whose rhythms were biological rather than commercial. The domestic culture fashioned by these women was a product of the increasing physical separation of home and work and the gradual decline of the overtly productive role of middle-class women. Whilst the ideology of separate spheres and its associated constructions of appropriate male and female roles were widely circulated well before this period of nascent industrial power, as British historian Anna Clark points out, ‘the very meaning and function of domesticity were dramatically changed for the middling sort of people with commercialisation, professionalisation, urbanisation and the consumer revolution.'5 Separate spheres was not an original concept but the new conditions of late eighteenth and nineteenth century western Europe facilitated the absorption and practice of the domestic ideal by the middle classes.Where are we to find the roots of the ideology of domesticity? The late eighteenth century writings of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau played an important part in defining a popular form of femininity based on woman's ‘natural' characteristics which fitted the conception of home as a moral haven and refuge from the disruption of industrial society.
In his philosophical treatises and more especially in his two novels, Rousseau expounded a model of domesticity which rested upon the separation of the public and private spheres and which depended upon the ‘natural' woman, personified by Sophie in the first novel, Emile (1762). Emile's future wife was to be brought up and educated to please her husband, to remain modest, chaste, respectable but also playful or coquettish in order to please him. For Rousseau, sexual difference was the key to harmonious domesticity:What is most wanted in a woman is gentleness; formed to obey a creature so imperfect as a man, a creature often vicious and always faulty, she should early learn to submit to an injustice and to suffer the wrongs inflicted on her by her husband without complaint; she must be gentle for her own sake, not his. Bitterness and obstinacy only multiply the sufferings of the wife and the misdeeds of the husband; the man feels that these are not the weapons to be used against him. Heaven did not make women attractive and persuasive that that they might degenerate into bitterness, or meek that they should require the mastery; their soft voice was not meant for hard words, nor their delicate features for the frowns of anger. When they lose their temper they forget themselves; often enough they have just cause of complaint; but when they scold they always put themselves in the wrong. We should each adopt the tone which befits our sex; a soft-hearted husband may make an overbearing wife, but a man, unless he is a perfect monster, will sooner or later yield to his wife's gentleness and the victory will be hers.6
It is to Rousseau that we can ascribe the image of the ‘angel in the house' — the idealised woman who personifies virtue, moral superiority and maternal sentiment. Although his view of woman's nature also incorporated a belief in woman's innate passion and sexual instinct, it was his portrayal of the true mother, the moral heart of the family unit, the educator of future citizens, which was to be taken up in the works of his admirers and by upper- and middle-class women who were searching for a meaningful role within the home.7 Rousseau stands out amongst his peers as a populariser and even an evangelist for domestic ideology and separate spheres, but his was by no means an isolated voice.
The belief in separate and distinctive male and female qualities was standard fare by 1800.Amongst the new commercial and educated middle classes in Germany, France and Britain, domestic joy through the separation of men's and women's spheres was an aspirational and attainable ideal. A German merchant of the first decades of the century, David Lewald, attended to his business and other affairs whilst his wife bore, raised and educated eight children, directed the household, engaged in creative handicrafts and perfected the art of being the perfect housewife and hostess.8 The German poet and philosopher Christoph Martin Wieland (1733—1813) compared the ideal wife to his own at the end of the eighteenth century: Without moods, even tempered, calm, agreeable, easy to amuse, used to an almost monastic way of life, content with everything as long as she can see an expression of contentment and affection in my face. She fits in effortlessly, and without being forced, with my taste, my mood, and my way of life.'9 Dorothea Wieland's perspective on her marriage is, unfortunately, not known to us; it is her husband who speaks for her when he states that her ‘very happiness is invested in and drawn from simply living for me and our family.'10 A woman's fulfilment was to be achieved through domesticity, a belief reflected in obituaries and memorials erected to those women who lived the domestic life. In 1840, it was said of the late Mrs Frances Goodby, the wife of a vicar in the English Midlands:
what a demand must have been made on the piety, patience, frugality and industry of the mistress of a small family... But her ardent and unceasing flow of spirits, extreme activity and diligence, her punctuality, uprightness and remarkable frugality, combined with a firm reliance on providence carried her through the severest times of pressure, both with credit and respectability.11
Evangelical Protestantism offered women not a subordinate but an exalted role.
The evangelicals’ primary aim was the transformation of national morality, and it was via the home and family life that the struggle against sin and immorality was to be waged. The domestic woman was thus a key component of the evangelical vision which has been dubbed the ‘religion of the household’.12 Hannah More (1745—1833), an English evangelical philanthropist, rejected the radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft, arguing that women should be content with their natural sphere: ‘A woman sees the world, as it were, from a little elevation in her own garden, whence she makes an exact survey of home scenes, but takes not in that wider range of distant prospects which he who stands on a loftier eminence commands’.13 By the 1830s and 1840s the evangelistic tone of More was replaced by more practical advice. Writers like Sarah Stickney Ellis (c.1800—72) argued that domestic management was as important as a man’s profession:it is but reasonable that man’s personal comfort should be studiously attended to, and in this, the complacence and satisfaction which most men evince on finding themselves placed at a table before a favourite dish, situated beside a clean hearth, or accommodated with an empty sofa, is of itself a sufficient reward for any sacrifice such indulgence may have cost... and he will sit down to eat, or compose himself to rest, with more hearty goodwill towards the wife who has been thoughtful about these things, than if she had been all day busily employed in writing a treatise on morals for his especial benefit...14
Harriet Martineau (1802—76) believed in the value of domesticity for women’s individual fulfilment — although in her ‘On Female Education’ (1822) she showed herself as a conservative disciple of Wollstonecraft in arguing that education would develop women’s potential and create a ‘race of enlightened mothers’.15
The ideology of domesticity which located the transmission of moral values in women was common across Europe, amongst both Catholics and Protestants. Amongst the Lutheran Nordic countries, the cult of domesticity, the belief in the moral regenerative power of the woman’s vocation in the household, was taken up by religious revivalists.16 In the restoration years following the Revolution in France, Catholics and conservatives regarded the household as the key to the country’s moral regeneration after the excesses of the revolutionary years.
According to the Vicomte de Bonald, a French aristocrat emigre and former civil servant who returned to France to work for the restoration of the monarchy, the patriarchal family was the key to stability and morality in public life. In his treatise on women's education in 1802 he began with the observation: ‘Women belong to the family and not to political society, and nature created them for domestic cares and not for public functions.' Girls and boyshave not received the same destiny from nature. Everything in [girls'] instruction should be directed towards domestic utility, just as everything in the education of boys should be directed toward public utility. It is a false education that gives one's inclinations a direction that goes contrary to nature, that makes the sexes want to exchange occupations just as they would clothing, that women would voluntarily take a hand in the government of the State, and that men would find a bit too much pleasure in private life and in domestic enjoyments.17
De Bonald's words are significant for they show that the language of separate spheres, and more important, the association of public and private with gender difference, was written and spoken by contemporaries. This was a new development but it was a trend that was to continue with a vengeance at all levels of society. In 1856 the women parishioners in one Dublin church were left in no doubt as to what was expected of them upon hearing the words of the Reverend John Gregg:
We have features peculiar to us as men, and we also have our peculiar capabilities and responsibilities. The great and weighty business of life devolves on men, but important business belongs to women... The larger portion of the labours of life — of public life — fall almost exclusively to the lot of men; but a most important portion of the duties of life, especially of private life, falls to the share of women. God has adapted our sex to the peculiar duties to which we are especially called, and for which you are not so well fitted; and He has adapted your sex to the peculiar duties to which you are called, and for which we are not at all fitted.
Society does best when each sex performs the duties for which it is especially ordained.18Few middle-class women resented or resisted the strictures of domesticity. Some, like the German writer Sophie von La Roche (1731—1807), managed to combine what appeared to be an idealised domestic life as a wife and mother with a successful literary career. To the modern-day reader, Sophie's daily routine of supervising the servants, overseeing the affairs of the house and spending time with her son, may appear dull, but she expressed considerable contentment with her pivotal domestic role.
I get up at 6 o'clock and get dressed, I write or read until half past seven, when La Roche [her husband] and Baron von Hohenfeld arrive for breakfast and stay until 9 o'clock. Then I go into the kitchen and give orders, because I know about the culinary arts, I inspect the housework, write my household accounts and then at around 12 o'clock [write] Pomona [her novel] and letters.
After lunch and an afternoon spent reading letters and sewing she returned to the kitchen to order the evening meal at 5 o'clock. In the evening she read with her son.19
The nineteenth-century middle-class woman embraced, celebrated and refined the cult of domesticity. It served what she perceived as her own interests. The wives of industrialists in the Nord region of France created homes that were a cultural expression of the female world, and not as a Rousseau- type haven to complement the world of industry. Their fashions, etiquette, domestic furnishings, social engagements, Catholic devotion and charitable activity all served to delineate a holistic, ‘natural' universe within which women could demonstrate their power. To the last, the wives of German civil servants who struggled to keep up appearances and maintain respectability in an aspiring lower middle class milieu, practised elaborate deceptions in order to give the impression of a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle, and gained identity and satisfaction from this, notwithstanding the heavy toll exacted by the strain of domestic management.20 The eighteenth-century image of the upper-class woman who spent her days idly exercising her creative talents, socialising with other women, and supervising the servants had, by the 1840s, been consigned to the realms of prescriptive literature. It had been superseded by the reality of the middle-class woman who worked hard to create her own domesticity, who fashioned her own private and public worlds.
The ideology of separate spheres was a central feature of middle-class culture in the nineteenth century. This applied equally to provincial England in the nascent industrial era, post-Napoleonic northern France, and Germany and Austria in the Restoration era following the 1848 revolutions. And yet the idea and the language of domesticity were adopted by elements of the working class too. Though separate spheres was an alien concept for the majority of plebeian men and women in Britain, Anna Clark notes that ‘radicals stole the notion of domesticity from middle-class moralists and manipulated it to demand the privileges of separate spheres for working-class as well as middle and upper-class, men and women.'21 Across industrialising Europe, working-men's calls for a ‘family wage' implied the primacy of marriage and the exclusion of women from paid work outside the home. The language of respectability rested upon the notion that the domestic sphere was a woman's natural home. ‘Everyone understands that her place is elsewhere than in the political arena', argued the French working men's newspaper L’Atelier in 1844; ‘her place is at the domestic hearth. Public functions belong to the man; private functions belong to the woman.'22 In place of egalitarianism in the workplace was protection in the home, and for many women this form of domesticity was far preferable to the position of a working woman.
It was not only working men who demanded the privileges of domesticity for their wives. Women were beginning to demand it for themselves in order to protect their status within the home. If separate spheres was to work then women had to be accorded their rightful status as wives, mothers and household managers. Such was the pervasiveness of the ideology throughout public life that German women engaged in divorce actions emphasised their ‘womanly’ qualities and their fulfilment of domestic duties in order to convince a judge of the validity of their claim. Women who bore their husbands’ indiscretions with fortitude and patience, who devoted themselves to their children and their domestic duties, women who lived their faith, were held in the highest esteem. In 1860, Emilie Beil from Hamburg argued in court that she was never distracted from the ‘dutiful care of the common household’ despite the violent behaviour of her husband, whilst in the same year Henriette Bucke claimed that throughout her miserable, violent marriage she had always tried to be ‘a faithful, active wife’.23 So, domesticity, or at least its language, made sense for some lower-class women for whom security resided in marriage and home.