History ETDs

Publication Date

12-12-1979

Abstract

This study is an examination of women and femininity in nineteenth-century America. Its central theme is the role of women in creating, responding to, and re-creating feminine gender. I discuss the evidence in terms of two major points: women's creation of gender out of their physical experience, and the centrality of the mother/daughter relationship in the evolution of femininity. My sources include literature written by women and men, the medical writings of physicians, midwives and healers, and the diaries of women whose lives were at least partially lived between 1800 and 1865. The sources necessarily limit the scope of this study to middle and upper class, urban women. I begin with a discussion of the two "scripts" of womanhood described in the popular advice literature of the time: a romantic script for adolescence and a maternal script for adulthood. I then compare the idealized notions of motherhood with women's actual experience of reproduction in the first decades of "modern" obstetrics and pediatrics. I argue that women idealized the "suffering woman" out of the contrast between the institution and experience of motherhood, and encouraged a romantic script as a transition for their adolescent daughters. The last section of this study is a description of the mother/daughter relationship as the key element in female acculturation. I use women's diaries and essays to illustrate the mixed maternal message concerning the relationship of women to the feminine role; a message which encouraged suffering as a womanly necessity and a feminine virtue. By living with a female role model who encouraged "femininity" while admitting that the role involved physical and psychic pain, daughters learned to accept suffering as a measure of womanhood. The "femininity" of suffering became an essential part of the sexual ideology of the mid and late mineteenth century.

Level of Degree

Masters

Degree Name

History

Department Name

History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Ferenc Morton Szasz

Second Committee Member

Margaret Jane Slaughter

Third Committee Member

Helen Marie Bannan

Language

English

Document Type

Thesis

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