Cult of Domesticity

The Cult of Domesticity and Middle-Class Manhood in the Nineteenth Century

Between the 1780s and the 1840s, the United States developed from a preindustrial society comprised of small communities to a more urban and industrialized society. This transformation created a middle class that occupied a distinct social and cultural stratum in U.S. society, and new models of masculinity helped to define this new class. To respond to the competitive pressures and opportunities of an expanding domestic market, middle-class men relocated their businesses from their households into separate offices away from the home. This functional separation of work and production from the home environment prompted middle-class men and women to redefine the domestic sphere as a counterpoint to a competitive, and often vicarious, marketplace, making the home a private refuge from the hustle and bustle of public life. This separation also prompted the construction of new definitions of manhood and womanhood suitable to the emerging social and economic order.

The ideology of domesticity defined men as naturally competitive and aggressive providers—traits appropriate to a public world of expanding commercial capitalism and to their responsibilities as breadwinners—while it defined women as naturally suited to home life through their inclination to compassion and piety. According to the cult of domesticity, males would be morally strengthened by women in the private sphere of the home, where they would be influenced by Christian piety, moral resolve, and such sentimental values as sincerity, candor, and faithfulness. While social change encouraged men to be more assertive and pursue their individual self-interest, Victorian Americans, concerned that such characteristics threatened social cohesion, envisioned the ideal man as a Christian gentleman who abstained from excess in all walks of life while fulfilling his obligations as a breadwinner and a citizen.

The cult of domesticity expressed middle-class Americans' discomfort with the kinds of social relations fostered by market capitalism. The insistence on the separation of the private, or domestic, sphere from the public sphere was intended to prevent the intrusion of market forces into the home and the commodification of personal relations. Yet by assigning men [Page 121]exclusive purview of the public realm and defining them as naturally inclined to competition and aggression, it legitimated an amoral and acquisitive male individualism. The cult of domesticity thus used diametrically opposed definitions of masculinity and femininity to create a coherent middle-class value system that embraced the apparently conflicting forces of competitive capitalism and moral behavior.

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