Chapter 14 - Defining and Defying a Woman’s Sphere

Summary

Nineteenth-century women gained limited property and voting rights by embracing naturalized gender roles, including motherhood, as famously described in Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home (1869). Such normative appeals to a feminized domestic sphere appear to contradict a first-wave nineteenth-century feminism that, through efforts like Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Declaration of Rights and Sentiments (1848), sought political gains for women in the form of property and voting rights equivalent to those of men, but second-wave feminist historians from the 1960s through the 1980s have shown how similar ends were advanced by less radical means: embracing the middle-class mother’s normative gendered role as natural nurturer enabled women to leverage their credibility within the domestic sphere in order to advance political projects both within and beyond it. In addition to resisting traditional restrictions on their rights, women embraced their gendered role as natural mothers to pursue political activism on behalf of impoverished women in urban areas. Third-wave feminism has challenged the normative roles at the core of this gendered separation of spheres, roles that at once restricted nineteenth-century women’s political activity but also authorized them to mobilize, as natural women and mothers, in political resistance to economic oppression.