The images of women and their ideal role as portrayed in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, and in Godey’s Lady’s Book share many important characteristics, but reveal subtle differences which reflect the gap between the British Empire and its wayward ex-colony. In neither country were women accorded the rights which we, today, take for granted. In neither country did this lack of rights translate into being exempt from the heaviest of labor inside the household. However, there are discernable differences, inferable from both publications, in the role of the wife and mother in the creation and growth of the nation.
In the middle of the 19th century, women on both sides of the Atlantic had many decades to go before obtaining the right of suffrage. Instead, the role of the mother of the nation was widely discussed as the aim and goal of American women. In this model of women’s place in society, mothers were to raise all their children to be model civic participants and support their spouse’s civic and economic achievement. An obvious weakness of this sop thrown to the bright and energetic women of the Federal period was that it marginalized, even more than they already were, women who could not or would not marry or have children. Additionally, this task was rather small beer for women who had lived and worked and made personal sacrifices through the heady days of the fight for independence, or who had seen and heard of their mothers doing so, or read about these exploits in articles such as Heroic Women Of The Revolution: Jane Gaston in Godey’s Lady’s Book (Ellet).
However, this encouragement for the civic preparation and therefore the education of all the children ( even if the girls were only to be taught in dame’s schools or in the off-season when haying and harvesting left the one-room schoolhouses empty of boys), was not without long term results. The early funding of public schools, colleges, and libraries, and the impetus for universal literacy probably owes much of its energy to this pressure for mothers to not only bear and rear, but also train, the future citizens well (Ellet).
However, this heavy responsibility for the future health of the Republic was laid upon women’s frail shoulders in the context of the fair sex being entirely subordinate legally to their husbands, unable to hold property in their own name, enter into contracts, go to court, pursue higher education alongside men, or enter professions. This did not pass unremarked, as is apparent from the excerpt from Goethe (Goethe). As discomfort with the issue of slavery and other inequities drew women into the arena of advocacy, the irony of campaigning for the rights of others while their own rights were still a dream became more pointed. However, the popular press was not necessarily the venue where such concerns were routinely hashed over.
The March 1850 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book appeared in the same half-decade as very public initiatives on behalf of women’s suffrage and rights. Not one hint of this ferment is visible explicitly in the articles. In fact, the tone of the excerpt from Goethe translated as “The Sphere of Woman” (Goethe), is dismissive of all objections to the status quo. On the contrary, the “prudent woman”, according to Goethe, “reigns in her family circle, making happiness and every virtue possible, and spreading harmony and peace throughout her domain.” As contrasted with the world outside the home, where the husband may not be able to realistically accomplish what he wishes, with a prudent wife running his household as he desires and she achieves, he is “a happy prince over that happiest domain”. Goethe goes on to assert, regarding the householder thereby freed from concern about his household, ”Thus, in a spirit of true independence, he can devote his energies to great objects – and become to the state (by promoting its prosperity) what his wife is to the household over which she presides.” (Goethe) It is tempting to speculate whether this essay in the original German is quite so neatly congruent with the aims of the young Republic, or whether the translator has subtly shaped the English text to fit the perceived needs of the newly independent and newly self-governing America.
A piece of historical fiction in Godey’s, the story of Katherine Walton, shows a heroine who is gracious even to her enemies, who describe her thus; “By my life,” said Cruden, “the girl carries herself like a queen. She knows how to behave, certainly. She knows what is expected of her.” In fact, the likelihood that all the valuables have been spirited away to hiding and safekeeping passes unobserved because, says one of her British visitors, ”everything was so neatly arranged and so appropriate, that I could fancy no deficiencies.” (Simms)
However, the men observing her express their hope that “as in that of all other unmarried young women, that she may soon find her proper sovereign.” The smitten Balfour says of her, “She is a queen…I only wish that she were mine. It would make me feel like a prince, indeed. I should get myself crowned” (Simms)
As it transpires, Katherine is indeed the intended queen of one of them, a fellow passing as a Loyalist, She chides him, in fine Revolutionary fashion, when they have a moment alone. She upbraids him for endangering himself and the cause, as follows: “I know that you are not the person, at a season when your services are so necessary to the country, to bestow any time even upon your best affections, which might better be employed elsewhere. Surely, there is a cause which brings you into the snares of our enemies, of a nature to justify this rashness.” (Simms)
It is clear that her lover, Singleton, is fully aware of her personal strength and ardor for liberty because he draws attention to the change in her.
” ‘You have become strangely timid and apprehensive, Kate, all of a sudden. Once you would have welcomed any peril, for yourself as well as me, which promised glorious results in war or stratagem. Now.’
‘Alas! Robert, the last few days have served to show me that I am but a woman. The danger from which you saved my father brought out all my weakness. I believe that I have great and unusual strength from (sic) one of my sex; but I feel a shrinking at the heart, now, that satisfies me how idly before were all my sense and appreciation of the great perils to which our people are exposed’.” (Simms)
And indeed, later in the story, when the British threaten, Singleton places her safely behind himself (Simms passim). This Katherine Walton is a prime romance novel heroine of her age; brave on behalf of the nation, but a shrinking blossom when her family’s safety is in danger, and there is an appropriate male to protect her. Of course, she is also always a lovely hostess and good manager of the household, even concealing by her neatness and artful table arrangements her sequestering of the family’s silverware (Simms passim).
Another article that highlights the ideal of American womanhood is the aforementioned story of Jane Gaston in the Revolution. The incidents that she and other women endured are as distressing as anything seen today on the news. The spirit and defiance of these colonial ladies are remarkable. The clue to what readers were to take away from the tales of these resourceful women (imagine the challenge of making a meal from the sweepings from the floor), is as follows; the “expectancy of the State is of those who are descended from the patriots whose lives have been devoted to the service of their country”. Even while recounting stories that clearly prove that women can be as tough and capable as men when motivated, Godey’s message is that they are meant to be the bearers (literally) of the seed for the future of the country (Ellet passim).
In England in 1850, conditions for women were not noticeably better. Women were subject to the same absence of rights and access to suffrage, education, professions, property holding, legal identity and action, divorce, and such, which afflicted their American sisters. In fact, since American law was based on English common law, these American deficiencies were attributable to the historical place of women in Britain for the previous several centuries.
English law regarding women reflected the long-standing negative attitudes of the Catholic Church towards women as the source of evil in the world, even though England had been independent of Rome for over a hundred years. Additionally, English women were subject to the additional burden of a far more rigid class structure, which limited the economic and social mobility of both sexes. There was also the issue of the established church; for those in the British Empire who were not members of the Church of England, many educational and employment opportunities were effectively closed off. Further, there was the question of ethnicity to contend with. The English were famously contemptuous of the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish, and, unfortunately, the dark-skinned peoples of their far-flung Empire. If you were a woman whose religion, race/ethnicity, or class, was not English, Anglican, and gentry, you were really at the bottom of the pile. Finally, once Queen Victoria took the throne, her personal idiosyncrasies stamped their imprint on the styles and fashions of the era, and these were not generally conducive to female independence.
In this context, Mrs.Beeton’s Book of Household Management both empowers the mistress of the household realm and reaffirms the rigidity of the existing order. It is clear that Mrs. Beeton believed that women were in charge of a complex and serious enterprise, and one which had implications outside her home, in managing the household economy. But there is much in Mrs. Beeton’s which oppresses. There are repeated apprehensive references to the careful choice of friends and acquaintances, suggesting that “those who possess a long experience of the world, scrutinize the conduct and disposition of people before they trust themselves to the first fair appearances.” (Sic). The section on friendships paints a picture of isolation that is almost painful for a modern reader. The lady of 1850 was obligated to choose her associations on the basis of their being prepared to “reprehend vice” and “defend virtue”.
It is instantly understandable the wisdom of Beeton’s directive that “A gossiping acquaintance who indulges in the scandal and ridicule of her neighbors should be avoided as a pestilence”, just as one would avoid someone who practices “fair-faced deceit”. This all sounds very modern in tone. However, forming a friendship of “a kind as well tend to the natural interchange of general and interesting information” sounds a bit bland and empty (Beeton 301). With such an agenda, friendship sounds like a rather sterile and duty-bound business. One wonders if the 1850’s wife and mother had, perhaps, vanishingly few outlets for ventilating her frustrations save her diary. While the specific Godey’s Lady’s Book articles examined here do not address this particular issue, it is intriguing to wonder whether Americans would have developed their famous openness, had they also been so heavy-handedly scolded by their editorial authorities against carelessly forming acquaintances and sharing confidences.
There is also an assumption expressed in this section on “the Mistress” that the household will include domestic servants, which many might regard as enabling the continued oppression of the less privileged classes. These people in her employ are acknowledged as being human at all mainly in the recognition that they are subject to self-indulgence in the same way their employers are. Otherwise, they are “domestics” or “servants” (Beeton 300).
The mistress is the model for the behavior of her staff (and other residents of her household). She is ideally “modest”, “prudent”, and “careful” (Beeton 300). She rises early, avoids “self-indulgence”, behaves thriftily, takes cold or “tepid” baths daily, and ensures that the whole household does likewise (Beeton 300) (a practice which most modern women and men would abjure with shivering loathing, but which must have represented an improvement over the virtual absence of bathing in earlier periods). Our model housewife seeks out constructive recreation and edifying society who may be entertained with “reality and truthfulness” and with “genuine hospitality” (Beeton 301).
Mrs. Beeton also makes some judgmental statements, even in this short passage, which reveal a prevailing hypocrisy of the era. Beeton includes a quote linking frugality to temperance, prudence and liberty, and implying that extravagance leads to poverty (Beeton 300). While this observation may be accurate in many cases, this quote from the (male) epigrammatic authority, Samuel Johnson, blithely ignores the important role of uncontrolled fecundity in impoverishing families and trapping them in poverty. In 1850 there was no legal way to control family size effectively and definitively, and the untrammeled rights of a husband to his wife’s person made voluntary conception control a rather hopeless enterprise. Women of all classes were at the mercy of their innate fertility and the whims of their husbands in any effort to plan conceptions. Although the next several decades would see increasing pressure to change this, it was not until living memory that true conception control became legal and available.
Mrs.Beeton’s opening encomium to the role of the prudent wife parallels that by Goethe, in the article previously cited from Godey’s (Goethe). This introductory section is capped by a lyrical verse from the Biblical book of Proverbs1. Beeton’s text makes the wife and mother out to be the angel of the household. Regarding her husband and children, she “reclaims the one from vice and trains up the other to virtue”. She is responsible for keeping her husband from doing the unspeakable, literally holding him back from degradation, and saving him from a soul’s disaster (Beeton 300). Note how this differs from the slightly different aim, expressed in the Goethe essay in Godey’s (Goethe), of freeing the husband for concentration on civic accomplishment.
Note also that the issue of children is covered in a section titled as the “Management of Children” (Beeton 300). Is this rather chilly choice of words by chance? Clearly, for Mrs. Beeton, child-rearing was yet another opportunity to demonstrate good supervision. Enjoying it was a very different question.
Beeton supports the mother’s responsibility to educate her children “to virtue” (Beeton 300). This goal of rearing children capable of demonstrating moral excellence and chastity is of course admirable, but it is subtly different from the American model. Virtue, alone, is not necessarily the same as civic virtue, as is held up for admiration in the articles in Godey’s (Ellet) (Simms), and it is certainly not the same as civic accomplishment, or, for that matter, any kind of accomplishment at all.
It is interesting, and yet another reflection of the status of women in 1861, when her book was originally published, to note that all the authorities which Isabella Beeton cites are male. Although she manages an international nod to the United States by quoting Washington Irving, sadly she could not include a quote from a woman to credibly support her contentions. Goethe is male, and the other Godey’s articles cited herein are also by men.
There is not a huge difference between the two views of women and their roles in Godey’s and Mrs.Beeton’s. However, the class structure definitely impresses itself on the mood of Mrs. Beeton’s, and adds an extra layer of obstacle to women’s freedom, movement, mobility, and independence. Additionally, where Godey’s woman is responsible for helping her husband and children to serve the new country, Beeton’s lady is responsible for helping her husband save his soul, safeguarding her children’s moral standing, and maintaining the social class structure. In both instances, the woman is expected to be competent at managing a household enterprise thriftily, with all the associated tasks of human resource management, real estate, food production and preservation, and possibly animal husbandry, gardening, education, among others, while retaining religious faith, good temper, social graces, and personal daintiness2.
Bibliography
Beeton, Isabella. “Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, Chapter 1, The Mistress.” Ed. French, and Poska. n.d. 300-301.
Ellet, E.F. “Heroic Women of the Revolution.” 2010. Godey’s Lady’s Book. University of Rochester. Web.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “The Sphere of Woman.” 2010. Godey’s Lady’s Book. University of Rochester. Web.
Simms, W. Gilmore. “Katherine Walton: or, The Partisan’s Daughter: A Tale of the Revolution.” 2010. Godey’s Lady’s Book. Web.
Footnotes
- The chapter in the book of Proverbs from which this verse is excerpted goes on to describe in detail the complex artisanal, husbandry, and entrepreneurial activity in which an Old Testament wife was expected to engage, independently, for the profit and support of her family. It is a bit ironic that this approach to women’s responsibility was reflected throughout the Bible, and formed the basis for the tradition, amongst some more modern Jewish populations, of women working out in the world, often in very responsible positions requiring higher education, to support their husbands in their exclusive study of sacred scripture.
- It is instructive to recall that both English and Yankee women were expected to accomplish all this without any representation politically and without indoor plumbing, birth control, or monthly sanitary protection.