Cult of Domesticity - Connection To The Women's Movement

Connection To The Women's Movement

Women who advocated for women's rights such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and Harriet Martineau were accused of disrupting the natural order of things, and condemned as unfeminine. "They are only semi-women, mental hermaphrodites," wrote Henry F. Harrington in the Ladies' Companion. During the Progressive Era, the New Woman emerged as a response to the Cult of True Womanhood. The New Woman, frequently associated with the suffrage movement, represented an ideal of femininity which was diametrically opposed to the values of the Cult of True Womanhood.

Early feminist opposition to the values promoted by the Cult of Domesticity culminated in the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and later influenced the second wave of feminism. After the Jacksonian Period, 1812 to 1850, had granted universal white male suffrage, extending the right to vote to virtually all white males in America, women believed it was their opportunity for civil liberty. However, even after the Declaration of Sentiments was written at the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, the right to vote was not extended to women until 1920.

The cult of domesticity arose again in the 1950s when television began to present shows that depicted fictional families where the mother would stay at home with the children while the man went to work. The Cult of Domesticity shaped an idealized myth of the family and paved the way for the nuclear family.