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Household Words and Catherine Beecher- PART THREE - Page 2

© Sandra Linville

Kimberly A. Wells, Domestic Goddesses Editor, notes: "Domestic fiction has often been criticized as being too narrow....They often had to make the hard choice between family and writing; many of them never married. Those who did marry were often very conflicted about their passion for writing versus their duties as mother;...But they overcame many odds to do so--...When we consider that most of them wrote their stories out longhand, stealing moments while their children were asleep and dinner was cooking -- (Louisa May Alcott even suffered extreme pain from mercury poisoning and had violent had crams from recopying her work)-- and when we consider the beauty and brace of much of their writing, we understand what we missed when these writers were forgotten."

Also at this site, Bonnie Melton, M.A. explores the history of women's work in In and Out of the Kitchen: Women's Work and Networks in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. In this thesis, she states: "The literature from 1850 to 1910 reflects how work varied according to place, race (due to the United States' unique situation of having simultaneously industrial- and slave-based labor systems), and gender. Mechanized production changed the place and the product of labor: wages became the purpose of work, and factories became the location of work. Men began to work outside of the home, while women and children (of the middle-class, at least) were expected to stay at home. Earning wages became a man's responsibility, managing a household became a woman's. As wage-work developed outside of the home, women reinvented the meaning of housework. Early feminists (called domestic feminists or material feminists) like Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catherine Beecher, saw an opportunity for women to command power as moral leaders within the home."

Melton further writes: "Regardless of the innovations in household space that the material feminists promoted, the ideal woman of the middle class was a profoundly private and virtuous creature who supported the moral life of her family while her husband supported the financial and public aspects of family life. But only a prosperous husband could support such a 'domestic goddess.' The industrial revolution sent many poor women and children to a hard life at factories, mills, and other forms of industrial labor. However, it was the middle class who set the standard for nineteenth-century womanhood. Harriet Beecher Stowe's and Catherine Beecher's writings were the epitome of the literary domestic writings of the nineteenth century."

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