Conclusion

Summary

FROM OUR TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY vantage point, the bourgeois model of the division of labor in the household and women's willing participation in it, which have been the focus of this book and, as we have seen, had gained prominence by around 1800, could be read as helping to cement patriarchal structures. Indeed, feminist critics have accused writers like Karoline Wobeser of encouraging women to perform self-sacrifice to their own detriment in the service of structures that benefit men. We certainly cringe at some of the statements regarding the domestic sphere and women's role in it, when measured with today's sensibilities. And indeed, as we have also seen, some of the women we discussed, such as Elise Bürger and Helmina von Chézy, rejected the prevailing domestic structures and escaped them.

However, for most of the voices—male and female—encountered in this book, the domestic sphere and domesticity held great promise as the most effective way to reshape the sociocultural structures of late-eighteenth- century Germany. Herder argued that if the state is to be a place where happiness can develop, it, in turn, depends on content and joyful individuals within the family unit. Women created the social and emotional networks within which individual happiness and the fortunes of the state were imagined to be flourishing, according to von Hippel; and the modern state depended on the foundation of the home that women's emotion work and social contributions created. Both aspects promoted the modernization (and enhancement) of the state by internalizing norms, creating benevolent dispositions, and eliminating strife. As they shed light on women's multidimensional work in the practical instantiation of this foundational vision of domesticity, they also pointed to its importance for economic and by implication political transformations. Thus public intellectuals considered the sociopolitical consequences of the everyday dimension of life and domestic bliss far from inconsequential.

The analysis of texts concerning love and marriage argued, for instance, that the emotion work of the wife was one of the key components of educated middle-class domesticity. By generating and tending to the emotive bonds in the relationship between the spouses and fashioning a warm, nurturing, and culturally engaging atmosphere, women ensured that the new organization of relations that was middle-class domesticity would be accepted.