In writing this in 1904, Mrs Schoff, President of the National Congress of Mothers, was expressing her belief in the important role women had to play in advancing the welfare of children. Mrs. Schoff's particular concern was with those children who had got into trouble with the law and she believed that the best way of promoting their welfare was to secure a juvenile court law in every state. She was not alone, either in demanding that women take a central role in campaigning for such reforms, or in articulating it in terms of women's maternal duty. For many other women voiced similar beliefs and women played a key role in campaigns for social welfare reform during the Progressive Era, especially those which focused upon children. However, this involvement of women in seeking legislative reform which would protect children was relatively new in 1904, and has only recently become a subject of interest to historians[2].
This survey examines the influences which prompted women to become involved in social welfare reform during the Progressive Era. It explores the female tradition of reform which had gradually developed over the course of the nineteenth century and considers the factors which contributed to the decision of female activists to demand legislative reform for children. Drawing upon research into the origins of the juvenile courts in the Progressive Era, it examines the importance of gender consciousness in influencing the particular shape reform took. The juvenile court movement raises some important questions for historians of women's social welfare reform. For women played a central role in the juvenile court movement throughout the United States, sometimes as individuals, but more often as members of women's clubs, settlement houses, and national organizations. The extent of their involvement varied, but it was rare for a state to pass juvenile court legislation without, at least, the active support of local women. Nor were female juvenile court reformers homogeneous[3]. Thus a study of the juvenile court movement, and indeed other female social welfare reforms in the Progressive Era, needs to go beyond the immediate task of writing women back into its history, to examine the interaction between gender consciousness and the shaping of social welfare reform[4].
The kind of gender consciousness which prompted women to become involved in social welfare reform during the Progressive Era, has recently been labeled maternalism by a number of historians of women[5]. The concept of maternalism accepted, even idealized, women's traditional role as wife and mother, but at the same time insisted that this meant women had a duty to extend their female skills and concerns beyond their own homes. The discourse of maternalism insisted upon women's role as universal mothers, making it the duty of all mothers to look after all children not just their own. Maternalism thus provided both a motivation and a means by which many American women entered politics in the Progressive Era. For, by emphasizing women's unique expertise in the area of child welfare, female reformers were able to demand legislative reform to protect children. But although the majority of female juvenile court reformers might have used the discourse of maternalism, not all of them were 'true maternalists.' For 'maternalism' has become an over-embracive term. By focusing more closely on the female juvenile court reformers, it becomes apparent that not all women reformers were the same. Indeed, some of the female juvenile court reformers, though they wrapped themselves in the ideology of maternalism, were often using it as little more than a rhetorical device or strategic posture[6].
Maternalism developed from an older tradition of female reform in the United States, but it was also a reflection of new ideas about childhood. Changing attitudes towards childhood during the nineteenth century meant that ever greater emphasis was placed upon the proper rearing of children in order that they might become good citizens, and it was to women that society turned to ensure that children were properly brought up. Organizations such as the National Congress of Mothers, of which Mrs. Schoff was president, drew upon this interest in childhood both to idealize motherhood and to teach mothers the most up-to-date and 'scientific' methods of child-rearing. At the same time, newer ideals of childhood awakened middle-class women to the fact that many children, especially of the immigrant and working classes, often lived in appalling conditions and clearly did not conform to these ideals. Since children represented the future of the country, it became clear to many of these women that if such conditions were allowed to continue, social instability might well be the result. Thus middle-class women were aroused to the necessity of improving conditions for all children, in part for altruistic reasons, but much more in order to protect the bourgeois social order. Maternalism therefore needs to be considered in the context of earlier traditions of female reform and nineteenth-century developments in attitudes towards childhood.
The nineteenth century saw the progressive development of a female reform tradition which grew out of pervasive middle-class attitudes towards women's proper role in society. This role had been gradually defined in the years following the Revolution, until by 1840 Alexis de Tocqueville could report that:
In America, more than anywhere else in the world, care has been taken constantly to trace clearly distinct spheres of action for the two sexes... You will never find American women in charge of the external relations of the family, managing a business, or interfering in politics... If the American woman is never allowed to leave the quiet sphere of domestic duties, she is also never forced to do so[7].
The idea of separate spheres for the two sexes permeated contemporary language, although de Tocqueville's assertion that women were confined to the domestic sphere has been shown not to reflect the reality of many women's lives. Nonetheless, scholars have used this concept of the separation of spheres as a key to explaining women's role in history. These scholars, like de Tocqueville, argued that men and women occupied separate realms - men the public sphere of work and politics, women the private, domestic sphere. Although the separate spheres idea became firmly entrenched as a major interpretative device of women's history, recent historians have demanded a more rigorous analysis of what this actually meant. They have asked whether or not it was accurate. Some have even begun to question whether it remains a useful analytical device[].
Historians of gender have consequently sought to explain the role of women in nineteenth-century American society not simply in terms of a clearly delineated domestic sphere, but in the interface between gender and society, and the dynamic nature of that relationship. Further, they have broadened the definition of women's place by addressing such factors as race, class, and ethnicity. They have explained that gender roles, especially those of women, were social constructs which served specific functions in American society. Thus, men and women gradually recast their ideas about the proper behavior and role of women in society as economic, social and, indeed, ideological factors reshaped the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries[9].
In the years following the Revolution, there was considerable debate among male and female writers and social thinkers as to what the role of women in the Republic should be. Since the male leaders of the new republic were clearly not prepared to accord women any new legal or political status, it was often women themselves - writers and educators - who sought to define women's relationship to the republic. Thus, women's domestic role was endowed with political meaning in terms of 'Republican Motherhood'. Woman's prime purpose in the new republic was to educate her sons to be virtuous and moral citizens, thus ensuring the future welfare of the state. Women were therefore to be the nurturers and protectors of future citizens - their role quite distinct from that of men[10].
The ideology of 'Republican Motherhood' was bolstered, in the early nineteenth century, by Protestant clergymen who gradually began to perceive that women could be their allies in the battle against the increasing secularization of society. Thus, religious anxiety and self-interest prompted clergymen repeatedly to declare that women's pious influence was crucial for the continued well-being of society[11]. For, by the early nineteenth century, most church-goers were female. Women also played a significant part in encouraging other family members to participate in the religious revivals which constituted the Second Great Awakening. Protestant clergymen, who in Puritan times had regarded women as temptresses and inciters to evil, now argued that far from tempting men away from the paths of good, women were instrumental in bringing men back to God. Protestant clergymen and women writers through sermons, popular literature, and advice literature began to construct a discourse in which woman's role was redefined as being the moral guardian of the family. Women, in these terms, were believed to be responsible for the ethical and spiritual character of the home, as well as its comfort and tranquillity. In this sphere, women were the acknowledged superiors of men. For, many ministers began to argue that only women could be an uplifting influence over home and children, being a source of moral values and a counterforce to the growing commercialism and self-interest of the outside world[12].
By the early nineteenth century, social and economic factors as well as ideological ones were playing an important part in reshaping women's position in society. The growth of industry and a market economy in the early nineteenth century had a profound impact upon gender roles. Women's sphere, which had previously been defined ideologically by Protestant clergymen and women writers in terms of Republican Motherhood, began to undergo a re-construction in the face of these social and economic changes. Proponents of the new capitalist order now began to construct women's sphere in purely private terms. While men occupied the public sphere of work and politics, women's place was now seen to be in the private world of the home and family, and her economic role in the family was no longer recognized[13]. Thus, pre-industrial patterns in which all members of the family were acknowledged as contributors to the family economy and in which gender roles enjoyed a certain amount of fluidity, were now replaced by a more rigid pattern of gender differentiation.
As a result, apologists for the emerging capitalist order constructed a discourse which defined women as being non-participators in the economy, though alongside this the older discourse of the moral mother continued. The cultural disassociation of women from economic productivity which had begun in the late seventeenth century became much more widespread and apparent as a result of the economic upheavals generated by the market revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries[14]. Although women generally still did participate in the market economy, both from within the home and outside it, middle-class women increasingly adopted the discourse of economic non-participation. Thus, the emerging middle classes, both male and female, frowned upon female participation in the market economy when they spoke of women of other classes, and denied it in their own case[15]. As Jeanne Boydston has noted, what had originated in the New England colonies of the late seventeenth century as the gendered division of labor, had become by the early nineteenth century the gendered definition of labor in the culture of the new republic. Only men were involved in the cash economy and women began to discount their own contribution to the economic needs of their families[16]. This had been necessary because, as Amy Dru Stanley has argued, the spread of wage labor, which had traditionally been regarded as a dependent status and therefore as feminine, had threatened to make men more like women. Thus, defenders of the new market relations in the North constructed an ideology of separate spheres in which home and work were counterpoised. The masculine sphere of work was constructed in terms of independent wage labor and its relationship to the market economy. In opposition to this was the female domestic sphere in which women were dependent and non-productive, and home life was distinct from the market economy[17].
This construction of an ideology of separate spheres was an important element in the emergence of a middle-class identity in the first half of the nineteenth century. By defining woman's role as domestic and private, quite separate from the worlds of the market place and public life, the middle class self-consciously established itself as a class apart[18]. Middle-class women refined the concept of female domesticity so that they were elevated to the status of 'Angels of the Home.' As housewives and mothers, middle-class women had come to be seen as morally superior both to men and women of other classes. They were the guardians of the nation's virtue[19].
While a number of historians have seen this domestic ideology as isolating and confining for middle-class women, because it restricted them to the limited roles of housewife and mother within their own homes, more recent scholarship has suggested that this was not the case[20]. The emphasis on domesticity and motherhood actually allowed women to become involved in activities beyond their own firesides. Moreover, the ideology of 'Republican Motherhood' was used to justify a demand for women's education, as educational reformers both male and female argued that women needed to be properly educated themselves in order to educate their sons. In other areas, too, women were able to expand the limits of their prescribed sphere beyond their own homes, gradually creating a space for themselves in voluntary activities and reform - areas not claimed by the male sphere of commerce and politics[21].
There were several factors which induced women to become involved in benevolent activities and reform in the ante-bellum decades. The period's rapid economic and social change prompted a growing differentiation in wealth and the emergence of many social problems which had not been so visible in small homogeneous rural communities. Accompanying these changes was a series of religious revivals which emphasized the individual and emotional side of Christianity, and the universality of salvation rather than predestination. Many converts felt impelled to express their new faith in good works and by the 1830s this religious zeal had been channeled into a number of reform movements and utopian experiments[22].
Many of the new converts were women and women were also to the forefront in encouraging other members of their families to convert. Considerable numbers formed themselves into church-related organizations, usually exclusively female, to raise funds and assist in church activities. In this they were encouraged by clergymen who emphasized the piety of women and their moral authority. They also constructed sex-segregated associations which were not specifically church-related but had a benevolent or moral purpose. In the period from about 1820 to 1860 female associations proliferated with a wide variety of purposes, some more radical than others. Women justified their involvement in the activities of these associations in terms of their innate female moral authority and difference from men and the duty this put on them to safeguard the moral standards of society. As a number of historians have shown, their efforts were part of the wider process by which the emerging middle class sought to establish its cultural dominance in the rapidly changing world. Middle-class women participated in this process through their own organizations which gave them independence from male authority and the ability to pursue their own gender-specific goals[23]. Women, in their independent benevolent associations, were an important force in providing charitable aid and demanding moral reform.
In the ante-bellum years middle-class women developed a reform tradition based upon a gendered discourse which emphasized their moral authority and their ability to speak for the needs of women of other races and classes. This led them to become involved, sometimes as the female auxiliary societies to male reform organizations, in the agitation for reforms which included temperance and moral reform and, more controversially, abolitionism[24]. Some women even went so far as to demand rights for women. The majority of women involved in benevolent associations were, though, involved in projects on a less ambitious scale, mainly consisting of friendly visiting among the poor and attempts to reform society through moral suasion. Most were expressly non-political, since involvement in politics was believed to undermine their specifically female mission[25]. Between about 1820 and 1860, white middle-class women working within the parameters of their prescribed sphere built vital and autonomous associations heavily involved in grassroots social activism.
The tradition of female voluntarism continued during the Civil War and afterwards. Many women volunteers, both North and South, raised funds for the opposing armies. In communities across the North, where there was a greater tradition of female organization and activism, women, trained in the ante-bellum female benevolent associations, became involved in Soldiers' Aid Societies. Many also participated in the work of a semi-public agency, the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Women helped to organize and distribute supplies to the Union troops through the Sanitary Commission and played a large part in the Northern war effort as fund-raisers and volunteer workers. In the South, too, where the tradition of female associations was not as strong, women contributed to the Confederate war effort in sewing circles and through thousands of relief associations and Soldiers' Aid Societies[26]. In the immediate post-war period, some Northern women participated directly in the reconstruction process in the South as teachers in schools for the children of the ex-slaves, while others helped through fund-raising activities in the North. For most middle-class women though, the end of the war meant a return to their pre-war voluntary activities. The 1870s and 1880s saw a greater diversity of female organizations, with the creation of vast numbers of new women's agencies - cultural clubs, civic improvement associations, and even professional women's societies - not all directly related to voluntary activism. Many women were also attracted by the great moral crusades of the period, most notably the national temperance crusade of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which built upon the ante-bellum tradition of women's moral reform[27].
A female reform tradition consequently developed during the nineteenth century which arose out of certain perceptions of 'woman's place'. From the early nineteenth century onwards it drew upon assumptions about female moral authority and superiority, together with the ability of middle-class white women to speak for other women. Though in theory such women were limited to the confines of their own homes, in practice many middle-class women were involved in social activism to varying degrees. Grassroots female associations organized the raising of funds for charitable purposes, visited the poor, and generally attempted to improve society through moral suasion. There was, too, a more radical and controversial brand of women's activism which sought women's rights and a greater role for women in society, but which challenged established prescriptions for women's behavior. Yet this attracted only a small minority of women activists. For the most part, female social activism remained within the confines of women's sphere and utilized a discourse which emphasized women's difference from men.
Alongside this female tradition of social activism large numbers of women became involved in clubs which promoted 'self-culture' in the years after the Civil War. The formal beginnings of the culture club movement may be dated from the founding of Sorosis in New York City in 1868. During the 1870s and 1880s, many literary and cultural clubs were formed across the United States, most of which were initially uninterested in reform causes. The majority of their members were married women with a considerable degree of education, who were looking for social company and an opportunity to refine their education in the growing cities. Again they justified these cultural clubs in terms of women's special qualities and as an alternative to the commercialism and competitiveness of the world of men[28].
By the end of the nineteenth century, many middle-class women had a tradition of constructing ideological justifications to explain their involvement in activities beyond the immediate confines of their own homes. Thus, they justified their involvement in community activism and cultural activities. In the last years of the nineteenth century a new discourse began to emerge which idealized woman's role as mother and which had considerable influence in dictating the kind of activism which middle-class women undertook[29]. The ideal of 'educated' or 'scientific' motherhood drew upon the older ideologies of 'Republican Motherhood' and domesticity, but also reflected the marked transformation in attitudes towards childhood and child-rearing which had been occurring throughout the nineteenth century.
In colonial New England, the dominant idea influencing attitudes towards children had been that they were born innately sinful. It had consequently been the duty of parents to suppress their children's natural depravity and break their wills[30]. There was also little recognition of childhood as a period of life distinct from adulthood. Children were generally considered to be little adults and were expected to be hardworking members of the family and community from an early age. They were expected to be deferential and obedient to their parents, and this remained their duty well into adulthood. While there was some consideration of youth in the special laws which insisted upon parents' responsibility to ensure that their children received proper guidance and education to enable them to become upright and God-fearing members of the community, there was little other recognition that childhood was a distinct or special period of life. Children were expected from an early age to be responsible for their actions[31].
By the early nineteenth century, society had become much more secular and many of the attitudes of colonial times were rejected. A new conception of childhood began to emerge, influenced by the writers of the European Enlightenment, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Johann Pestalozzi. This emphasized the naturalness and individuality of children. Children were considered to be more innocent, and childhood itself was perceived as a period of life which was not only worth recognizing and cherishing, but also worth extending. These new conceptions about the nature of childhood came at a time when social and economic changes were influencing the constitution of family relationships. As the market economy moved the locus of production from the home and adult men gradually went out to work, children as well as their mothers began to be perceived as dependents and non-participators in the economy. Therefore, middle-class families began to limit the size of their families as children ceased to contribute to the family economy and instead became burdens upon it[32]. However, enlightenment ideas about childhood ensured that children, possibly for the first time, were seen as special, the main reason for the existence of the family.
As new emphasis was placed upon the special nature of childhood, the responsibility for the proper rearing of children was placed upon parents, but more particularly on mothers[33]. Whereas previously any advice books on child-rearing had been aimed at fathers, now large numbers of such books were published by clergymen, doctors and women writers, all aimed at mothers. The ideology of Republican Motherhood further testified to the new importance placed upon mothers as the primary rearers of children. As mothers became the primary child-rearers, advice writers shifted their focus. Emphasis was now placed upon the nurture and development of a child's conscience and individuality, rather than upon breaking his will. Mothers were to cherish their children and carefully regulate their childhoods in preparation for adulthood. The primary purpose of child-rearing became the internalization of moral prohibitions, behavioral standards, and a capacity for self-governance that would prepare the child for the outside world. Moreover, since childhood was seen by these advice writers as an important period in the formation of an adult's character, care had to be taken that children were subjected to the proper influences. Children were considered to be especially impressionable and therefore if they were not protected from evil influences they were likely to develop wayward tendencies[34].
As the nineteenth century progressed, a consensus emerged among northern middle-class families that only a gradual process of maturation within the protected confines of the home could ensure a smooth transition to adulthood and childhood was to be prolonged until the process was complete[35]. Moreover, the middle-class child ceased to have any economic value to its family, since it no longer contributed to the family economy, but its emotional value was perceived as priceless, and in the last decades of the nineteenth century children's lives were increasingly 'sacralized' - being invested with a great sentimental, even quasi-religious meaning[36].
This new emphasis upon childhood was promoted by such new institutions as the kindergarten, which was inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Froebel and stressed the socialization of the child through play. The kindergarten idea was first introduced into the United States in the late 1840s, but it was not until after the 1876 Centennial Exposition, where the advocates of the kindergarten had presented an exhibition of their methods, that Froebel's ideas become popular. Froebel's major contribution was to divide the process of early education between birth and the age of six, into distinct stages of physical and mental development - infancy, early childhood, and childhood. For each of these stages he developed distinct educational tasks. Froebel declared the child to be essentially good by nature, a bundle of possibilities at the beginning of life. As a result of these ideas, Froebel and his followers developed a new theory of childhood education - symbolic education. This advanced the idea that the child's thoughts pre-existed as feelings and emotions, but that these could not be cultivated directly, only through the strenuous training of intellectual faculties were these feelings given general form thus allowing them to become ideas. Having formed his own ideals through symbolic training and through directed play, the child learned to adapt these ideals to others before leaving the kindergarten[37].
While the kindergarten idea was not always welcomed by the middle classes for their own children, since it stressed the importance of the trained kindergarten teacher rather than the mother in the training of the child, it was widely accepted by them as a means of training immigrant children and other children of the slums. With the establishment of free kindergartens in working-class neighborhoods in the 1870s, the advocates of kindergartens began to suggest that the proper training of these children might eventually lead to the elimination of urban poverty. For they believed that not only could they socialize the slum child in the habits of cleanliness and discipline but, through evening classes, educate working class mothers in the principles of Froebelian child nurture. Thus, through the child and his now educated mother, the family could be taught 'proper', that is middle-class, ideals of family life. It was further believed that by recovering the child before the stamp of the slum was irrevocably placed upon him, he could be taught habits of virtue and thus prevent the creation of future generations of paupers and criminals[38].
At a time when the influx of vast numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe was causing great anxiety about the future dominance of Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture in the United States, the immigrant child was an obvious target for Americanization. The kindergarten idea was widely accepted among middle-class reformers as a way of inculcating into poor and immigrant children their own values and ideas. It was also seen as a way of lifting these children out of lives of degradation. Thus many of the settlement houses established during the 1890s founded free kindergartens as one of the earliest efforts to help their neighbors in the slums. Women's clubs also frequently supported kindergartens financially[39].
By the late nineteenth century children had become recognized as a distinct group whose interests were no longer identical with those of their parents or the greater community. The kindergarten movement and the child study movement of the 1890s, led by the psychologist, G. Stanley Hall, served to nurture a greater awareness of the unique nature of childhood, and the basic emotions and interests characteristic of the child. As a by-product of this, woman's role as an educated mother was greatly enhanced since Hall insisted that the mother should respond differently to each stage of the child's growth. The new ideas about the nature of childhood tended to be confined to the middle classes, however. It was not until the twentieth century that they began to filter through to the working classes[40]. For, the new emphasis upon the economic dependence of children was regarded as undesirable and impractical among working-class parents who relied upon their children's labor to contribute to the family's economic survival. This increased awareness of the importance of childhood was also reflected in the belief that children were indispensable in the battle for the nation's destiny. Children were seen as embryonic citizens who represented the future of the country; if neglected, they were likely to be a threat to the future of the nation.
It was against this background that the new ideal of educated motherhood emerged, and the discourse of maternalism was constructed. For the child who held the future destiny of the nation in his hands had to be carefully nurtured by a mother who was fully conversant with the new theories of child study and child-rearing. The child was no longer a simple creature but a complex one whose every development had to be carefully watched and guided. Thus, motherhood was increasingly idealized, while at the same time there was a growing concern about those children who did not have the advantages of a mother trained in 'scientific motherhood'. It was this concern about the possible consequences to society of allowing children to grow up in ignorance of the 'proper' social standards, that prompted many middle-class women to seek means to ensure that all children should conform to their own ideals of childhood. In so doing, women reformers turned increasingly to legislative reform to validate their actions. For, as a number of recent historians including Theda Skocpol and Paula Baker have pointed out, women were much more willing and able to use the state to obtain social welfare reform than were men[41].
This paper forms part of a forthcoming book.
[1]Hannah Kent Schoff, "A Campaign for Childhood," in Samuel J. Barrows, ed., Children's Courts in the United States: Their Origins, Development and Results (Washington D.C., 1904), p. 136.
[2]For the literature on women and the creation of the welfare state see, Elizabeth J. Clapp, "Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement," Journal of American Studies, 28 (Dec. 1994), pp. 359-383.
[3]Earlier works on the juvenile court movement in the United States include: Herbert H. Lou, Juvenile Courts in the United States (Chapel Hill, 1927); Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago, 1969); Joseph M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1971); Robert M. Mennel, Thorns and Thistles: Juvenile Delinquents in the United States, 1825-1940 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1973); Steven L. Schlossman, Love and the American Delinquent: The Theory and Practice of 'Progressive' Juvenile Justice, 1825-1920 (Chicago, 1977); Ellen Ryerson, The Best Laid Plans: America's Juvenile Court Experiment (New York, 1978); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston, 1980); John R. Sutton, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640-1981 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1988); Eric C. Schneider, In the Web of Class: Delinquents and Reformers in Boston, 1810s-1930s (New York, 1992); Charles Larsen, The Good Fight: The Life and Times of Ben B. Lindsey (Chicago, 1972). Only Platt looks specifically at women reformers.
[4]These ideas are developed further in, Clapp, "Welfare and the Role of Women: The Juvenile Court Movement," pp. 359-383.
[5]Definitions of maternalism may be found in: Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, "Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880-1920," American Historical Review, 95 (October 1990), pp. 1076-1108; Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, "Introduction: 'Mother Worlds'," in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds., Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993), pp. 1-42; Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana and Chicago, 1994), pp. 3-7.
[6]On the uses of the language of motherhood see: Molly Ladd-Taylor, "Towards Defining Maternalism in US History," Journal of Women's History, 5 (Fall 1993), pp. 110-113.
[7]Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (2 vols., New York, 1966, first published in 1840), II, p. 778.
[8]Ellen Du Bois et al., "Politics and Culture in Women's History," Feminist Studies, 6 (Spring 1980), pp. 26-64; Nancy A. Hewitt, "Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women's History in the 1980s," Social History, 10 (October 1985), pp. 299-321; Linda K. Kerber, "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History," Journal of American History, 75 (June 1988), pp. 9-11; Joan W. Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis," American Historical Review, 91 (December 1986), pp. 1053-1075; Amy Dru Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market," in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, c.1800-1880 (Charlottesville, forthcoming).
[9]This is discussed by Linda Kerber in "Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place," pp. 37-39.
[10]Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, 1980); Ruth Bloch, "The Gendered Meaning of Virtue in Revolutionary America," Signs, 13 (Autumn 1987), pp. 37-58; Linda Kerber, "A Constitutional Right to be Treated Like American Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship," in Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds. U.S. History as Women's History: New Feminist Essays (Chapel Hill and London, 1995), pp. 24-25.
[11]Mary P. Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge and New York, 1981), pp. 60-104: Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven, 1977), pp. 126-159; Ruth H. Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815," Feminist Studies, 4 (June 1978), pp. 101-126.
[12]Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860," American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), pp. 150-174; Glenna Matthews, "Just a Housewife": The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York, 1987), pp. 35-65.
[13]Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood; Ruth H. Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition," pp. 101-126; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market." On the economic and social upheavals of the time, see: Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York and Oxford, 1991).
[14]Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York, 1990); Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750-1850 (New Haven, 1986); Sellers, The Market Revolution, pp. 243-245.
[15]Boyston, Home and Work; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860 (Urbana and Chicago, 1987, first published 1982); Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca and London, 1991). Lori Ginzberg has also shown how some middle class women received wages for their charity work, Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19th-Century United States (New Haven, 1990), pp. 53-59.
[16]Boydston, Home and Work, pp. 51-55.
[17Stanley, "Home Life and the Morality of the Market."
[18]Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Sellers, The Market Revolution, pp. 237-269; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, pp. 1-10; Stansell, City of Women, pp. xii- xiii; Stuart M. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America: A Critique and Proposals," American Historical Review, 90 (April 1995), pp. 299-338.
[19]Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, pp. 11-18; Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood," pp. 150-174; Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition," pp. 101-126.
[20]Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood," pp. 150-174; Barbara Berg, The Remembered Gate: Origins of American Feminism: The Woman and the City, 1800-1860 (New York, 1978); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA., 1992), pp. 322-323.
[21]Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, 1973); Barbara M. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Women and Higher Education in America (New Haven, 1985); Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 151-159; Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 210-225.
[22]On the upheavals of this period, see Sellers, The Market Revolution. See also, Sara M. Evans, Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America (New York, 1989), pp. 73-74.
[23]Kathryn Kish Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830-1930," in Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World, pp. 51-53; Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984); Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence. On cultural hegemony see: T. J. Jackson Lears, "The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities," American Historical Review, 90 (June 1985), pp. 567-593; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 323-326.
[24]Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review, 89 (1984), pp. 620-647; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, pp. 36-42; Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, passim.
[25]Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power," pp. 51-53; Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana and Chicago, 1992), pp. 11-57; Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence.
[26]Scott, Natural Allies, pp. 58-77; Sklar, "The Historical Foundations of Women's Power," pp. 60-61; Drew Gilpin Faust, "Altars of Sacrifice: Confederate Women and the Narratives of War," in Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (New York and Oxford, 1992), pp. 171-199; Jeanie Attie, "Warwork and the Crisis of Domesticity in the North," in Clinton and Silber, eds., Divided Houses, pp. 247-259.
[27]See for instance, Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Liberty and Power, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981); Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 323-328.
[28]Karen Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York, 1980); Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 328-333.
[29]Sheila Rothman, Woman's Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York, 1978); Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, pp. 3-7.
[30]Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York, 1988), pp. 1-2.
[31]John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York, 1970), pp. 131-144.
[32]Sellers, The Market Revolution, pp. 239-242; Boydston, Home and Work, pp. 99-104; Viviana Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York, 1985).
[33]John Demos, Past, Present and Personal: The Family and Life Course in American History (New York, 1986), pp. 41-67; Bloch, "American Feminine Ideals in Transition," pp. 101-126; Kerber, Women of the Republic; Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 157-162.
[34]Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle Class, pp. 157-162; Sylvia D. Hoffert, Private Matters: American Attitudes Toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860 (Urbana and Chicago, 1989).
[35]Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York, 1980), pp. 66-68; Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, pp. 21, 47-49, 58-60.
[36]Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, pp. 3-11.
[37]Michael Steven Shapiro, Child's Garden: The Kindergarten Movement from Froebel to Dewey (University Park and London, 1983), pp. 50-60.
[38]Shapiro, Child's Garden, pp. 85-96.
[39]See for instance, Julia C. Lathrop, "Hull House as a sociological laboratory," Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, 1894, pp. 313-319; May 21, 1884, box 1, volume 7, Chicago Woman's Club Papers, Manuscript Division, Chicago Historical Society.
[40]Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, passim.
[41]Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, pp. 314-320; Baker, "The Domestication of Politics," pp. 620-647.