HomeWorks

About this Essay and our Teaching Modules

In Spring 2021, Clara Pakman, then a sophomore at Dartmouth College, served as a Research Scholar for the HomeWorks Public Humanities Project. In that role, she researched some of the key terms used across all four HomeWorks teaching modules. “Domesticity” is a central term for the writers featured on our site. In this essay, Clara reveals that domesticity is surprising in its scope and historical specificity, revealing that domesticity is also tied to the foreign, the wild, and underlies the history of US imperialism.

“On Domesticity” by Clara Pakman, Dartmouth ’23

Studies of domesticity focus largely on the Anglophone world of the 19th century, a point in British and American history when writers and cultural institutions began to promote the idea that a woman’s “proper place” is in the home. White upper-class women in England and the northeast of North America were inculcated with expectations that constrained their sphere of activity to the home and glorified submission to patriarchal authority. The English poet Coventry Patmore summarized his conception of proper domestic behavior in the poem “the Angel in the House:” “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman’s pleasure” (105). American historian Barbara Welter analyzed and defined the North American social codes for women in her 1966 article, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860.” She explains how women were expected to cultivate the four pillars of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity in their roles as mothers and wives by raising proper children, tending to housework, and maintaining a pious home in which the husband could take pride. These idealized women were also expected to engage in a variety of gendered domestic activities such as gardening, letter-writing, needlework, music, charity work, and caring for family members when they fell ill. These idealized expectations and pastimes were only attainable to those with enough wealth to have a house of their own, thus excluding enslaved women, working class women, indigenous women, and others.

But “domesticity” does not only encompass the idealized Victorian home. The Merriam Webster Dictionary defines “domesticity” as “the quality or state of being domestic or domesticated,” where “domestic” means:

1. “living near or about human habitations;”
2. “of, relating to, or originating within a country and especially one’s own country;”
3. “of or relating to the household or the family;”
4. “devoted to home duties and pleasures;”
5. “indigenous.”

Critic Amy Kaplan points out that because domesticity delineates the boundaries of home, it is also directly involved in the construction of that which is not-home; thus, the domestic constructs the foreign, the tame constructs the wild, the civilized constructs the savage, the private constructs the public, and so on. Similarly, the helpful resource, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, refers to domesticity as “a regulative norm that continually refigures families, homes, and belonging.” This expanded perspective shows us how we can think of domesticity through the lens of its opposites to generate a more comprehensive and critically informed understanding of home.

Although the demands of The Cult of Domesticity could only be embodied by upper- and middle- class women, women in other groups lived lives that put pressure on this exclusive ideal. For example, enslaved women performed many of the traditional duties of domesticity; they cooked, cleaned, raised and bore children—for the slaveowner’s family, yet they struggled with being considered less-than-human and not quite “women.”. The communal nature of many Native American Tribes challenges western gender roles as well as the idea of individual domesticity, as groups lived in seasonal shelters and often shared resources. Furthermore, during this period, Indigenous peoples were forcibly removed and repeatedly relocated from their native homelands by the US government, as the Supreme Court redefined their political status as “domestic dependent nations,” contradictorily refiguring Native American land as both foreign/wild and domestic/tame.

Similarly, women who were forced to work outside their homes subverted the divide between public and private life. “Factory girls,” usually young middle-class white women and immigrants working in factories to support their families, created new spaces of female activity by earning their own money, attending lectures, living communally, and raising interest in women’s rights through public demonstrations and speeches. Unmarried women, marriage resistors, and what we would now call “queer” women lived together, creating homes outside of traditional, heteronormative domesticity. Writers reconfigured the nature of “adventure” to include and expand the activities allowed to girls. These diverse experiences of home render domesticity an ever-expanding term whose contradictions continue to unearth truths about our experiences of gender, the home, and womanhood. 

Resources

Kaplan, A. Manifest Domesticity. American Literature, 70(3), 581-606. 1998. doi:10.2307/2902710

“Domesticity.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/domesticity. Accessed 30 Jun. 2021.

George, Rosemary Marangoly. “Domestic.” Keywords for American Cultural Studies, Third Edition. Eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. New York: New York University Press, 2020. 89. Print.

Patmore, Coventry. “Coventry Patmore’s Poem, The Angel in the House.” The British Library, The British Library, https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/coventry-patmores-poem-the-angel-in-the-house. Accessed 30 June 2021.

Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860.” American Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966, pp. 151–74, doi:10.2307/2711179. JSTOR.