Canadian_Watcher:
One of my favorite feminists, Barbara Welter, calls it "The Cult of Domesticity" or "The Cult of True Womanhood." - There's a really excellent piece online, I was thrilled to have found exactly what I was looking for here: The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860
Funny that - here we've got an anti-feminist and a feminist drawing on exactly the same crappy Victorian attitude to prove his/her points! I love it!
If you look through it you'll see that it does not vilify men for this phenomenon, this was something that middle and upper class women perpetrated fiercely on their own sex. However, in describing what they saw as the true nature of women the people of that era also described the opposite - what they perceived to be the true nature of men. It's interesting reading, really.
One of the roots of the problem as I see it is that somehow man and woman have been placed as opposites, and therefore when we think of an attribute like gentleness, for example, we want to assign it and its opposite to one or the other of the genders. Somehow as a culture we've gotten so lazy as to put everything into either/or categories.
Welter's essay is really an important work. I first encountered it in college taking the required American History 101. My parents were both from New England and my father worked in the textile industry and so our family moved south as the industry did. Even though I was born in Virginia, as a kid I was a Yankee in Dixie and that kind of made me interested in what makes for cultural differences. Anyhow for a college research paper in that intro American History course a question that animated me, or rather a vague hypothesis, was how did it change things that after the war there was a generation with many more women than men--so many men had been killed in the Civil War. I was particularly interested in differences in the idea of womanhood in the South versus the North. Obviously I had to write a paper for the class and such research was too far ranging that purpose, so just kind of a backdrop.
One theory about Southern character that's been taken up by scholars in particular to account for the greater incidence of violence in the South is the culture of honor. The bare bones of the theory is that settlement of the north was had more people from farming regions whereas the Scots Irish who went south had more of a herding culture. While this theory is widely cited, I don't really think it tells the story all that well. Culture of honor is and idea applied to various societies from an anthropological or sociological perspectives. It's a useful perspective for understanding American regional differences, but obscures as much as it reveals.
As a kid growing up in the South something that was hard to escape was how mothers were actively engaged in transmitting the particular culture of honor of the American South.
In this thread there are many points of view that have been brought up, all of us seem to have a piece of the puzzle of what constitutes misogyny that we think is particularly important, that's part of what makes the thread contentious. The shiny object that I've been fixated on is notions of gender. Welter's essay in a compact form notes that as the industrial revolution pushed industry outside the home base a new compact developed. Men were given the authority outside whereas women authority in the home--obviously just a thumbnail sketch.
Years ago when I was student-teaching a fifth-grade class--eleven year olds--in a unit of instruction on presidential elections I asked the students to write on the question: Should we elect a woman as president? One boy wrote: I don't think we should elect a woman as president because [if we did] then we wouldn't have any freedom. His answer illustrates how generally in the USA it's mothers who tell children what they may do, the authority in the home rests with women. Family systems in other places aren't exactly like this, of course generalizations of what American family systems are like are very rough approximations. But Welter's cult of domesticity does provide a useful lens to view and to understand the sorts of stories we use to navigate our experience.
National character studies have fallen out of favor, but were popular during WWII. Gregory Bateson as an Englishman in America was aware of the difference. He pointed out that in the USA there was a tendency towards bipolar differentiation: "Republican-Democrat, political Right-Left, sex differentiation, God and the devil, and so on." He noted that in the UK a tendency toward ternary systems such as "parents-nurse-child, king-ministers-people, officers-N.C.O's-privates" etc.
I think that the tendency to put things into either/or categories which Canadian posits as an intellectual pitfall is very common across human societies; that people tend to think in dichotomies. But I also think that Americans for a variety of reasons are particularly prone to think in terms of binary systems. It's easy to discount Welter's cult of domesticity as old-fashioned, nonetheless it provides a window to see assumptions about the way the world is that still influence us. When the Equal Rights Amendment was being debated many American women were convinced that ratifying the amendment would represent a diminution of their status within society. Ultimately ratification of the amendment failed. Mothers are important in the transmission of culture to children. The cult of domesticity is an old fashioned story, but some variant of it still holds some sway as we teach our children.
One of my nieces is a Mormon and writes a "Mommy" blog, so I've gotten a view of the genre. I've seen where women who identify as Feminists have remarked that reading Mommy blogs is a kind of guilty pleasure. I can understand it. Even though they probably don't think that the story of relationships told in the blogs works for them as feminists, at least the blogs tell a gendered story.
I mentioned before Ivan Illich's book "Gender" and his critique that capitalism advances a non-gendered view where one hand can be replaced by the next. Illich points out that rather than a path toward liberation a not-gendered story for culture tends to disadvantage women as a group. The "deal" that Welter writes about: men get authority outside the home, and women authority inside the home, is probably not a story which produces the sorts of outcomes we want today. Still I think that Illich's caution that taking the idea of gender out of the equation isn't really a solution is a good point.
It seems that thinking in terms of dichotomies is very human. Dialectics is firmly established in the history of philosophy and as a not very educated person I've got some sense for Hegalian Dialectics which includes a threefold system with "synthesis" and I suspect most others have some sense of it too. In "The Metaphysical Club" Louis Menand's book about American Pragmatism, Menand writes about how Jane Addams changed John Dewey's concept of a dialectic:
I can see that I have always been interpreting dialectic wrong end up, the unity as the reconciliation of opposites, instead of the opposites as the unity in its growth, and thus translated the physical tension into a moral thing... I don't know as I give the reality of this at all,... it seems so natural & commonplace now, but I never had anything take hold of me so
My sense is that people aren't anytime soon going to stop thinking in terms of gender, but that a perspective of "the unity in its growth" is the best way to come at the subject. Thinking in terms of relationships will make the best sort of stories from which to organize our lives.
