Cult of Domesticity - Impact

Impact

The Cult of Domesticity affected married women's labor market participation in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. True Women were supposed to devote themselves to unpaid domestic labor and refrain from paid, market-oriented work. Consequently, in 1890, 4.5% of all married women were "gainfully employed," compared with 40.5% of single women. Women's complete financial dependence upon their husbands proved disastrous when wives lost their husbands through death or desertion and were forced to fend for themselves and their children. The division between the domestic and public spheres had an impact on women's power and status. In society as a whole, particularly in political and economic arenas, women's power declined. Within the home, however, they gained symbolic power.

The legal implications of this ideology included the passage of protective labor laws which limited women's employment opportunities outside the home. These laws as well as subsequent Supreme Court rulings such as Muller v. Oregon were based on the assumption that women's primary role was that of mother and wife and that women's non-domestic work should not interfere with their primary function. As a result, women's working hours were limited and night work for women was prohibited, essentially costing many female workers their jobs and excluding them from many occupations.

Women were seen as better suited to parenting. Catharine Beecher, a headmistress who proselytised about the importance of education and parenting, once said, "Woman's greatest mission is to obey the laws of God, first in the family, then in the school, then in the neighborhood, then in the nation, then in the world." Also, because of the expected behaviors woman were assumed to make better teachers and thus one of the first out of home jobs for women was teaching. One estimate says that one quarter of all native-born New England women in the years between 1825 and 1860 were schoolteachers at some point in their lives. Peoples of the nineteenth century, both men and women, did not consider what women did as wives and mothers as work but as an effortless expression of their feminine natures.