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Essay on "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" by Barbara Welter
Despite the many adversities that come women’s way, they, for the most part, remain faithful adherents to the Cult of True Womanhood. As Barbara Welter has described it, True Womanhood had "four cardinal virtues--piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity" and "marriage was the proper state for the exercise" of these virtues. "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860" is prefaced with an introductory paragraph, which expresses much of the True-Woman philosophy, attacking divorce and suggesting prudence, fidelity, fortitude, and, most intriguing, physical education as preventative measures against it.
The nineteenth-century American man was a busy builder of bridges and railroads, at work long hours in a materialistic society. The religious values of his forbears were neglected in practice if not in intent, and he occasionally felt some guilt that he had turned this new land, this temple of the chosen people, into one cast counting-house. But he could salve his conscience by reflecting that he had left behind a hostage, not only to fortune, but to all the values which he held so dear and treated so lightly. Woman, in the cult of True Womanhood presented by the women’s magazines, gift annuals, and religious literature of the nineteenth century, was the hostage in the home. In a society where values changed frequently, where fortunes rose and fell with frightening rapidity, where social and economic mobility provided instability as well as hope, one thing at least remained the same - a true woman was a true woman, wherever she was found.
If anyone, male or female, dared to tamper with the complex of virtues that made up True Womanhood, he was damned immediately as the enemy of God, of civilization, and of the Republic. It was the fearful obligation, a solemn responsibility, which the nineteenth-century American woman had - to uphold the pillars of the temple with her frail white hand. (Welter 1966).........
