Question

What is the “doctrine of two spheres” and how did this affect family life in the early 1900s??

Answer 1

• The Doctrine of Two Spheres - Men were to follow production out of the household, and women were to remain responsible for reproduction at home - Cult of true womanhood - An ideal that not all groups could achieve; a class ideology that separated middle class “ladies” from working class women - controlled women, narrowed their options, & lowered their status.Women and men have different roles because they have different interests and influences- women have home and children and men have work and the outside world.
• Those women who sought roles or visibility in the public sphere often found themselves identified as unnatural and as unwelcome challenges to the cultural assumptions. The legal status of women was as dependents until marriage and under coverture after marriage, with no separate identity and few or no personal rights including economic and property rights. This status was in accord with the idea that women's place was in the home and man's place was in the public world.
• The idea of separate spheres also displayed a distinct class bias. Middle- and upper-classes reinforced their status by shielding “their” women from the harsh realities of wage labor. Women were to be mothers and educators, not partners in production. But lower-class women continued to contribute directly to the household economy. The middle- and upper-class ideal was only feasible in households where women did not need to engage in paid labor. In poorer households, women engaged in wage labor as factory workers, piece-workers producing items for market consumption, tavern and inn keepers, and domestic servants.
• While many of the fundamental tasks women performed remained the same—producing clothing, cultivating vegetables, overseeing dairy production, and performing any number of other domestic labors—the key difference was whether and when they performed these tasks for cash in a market economy.
• While the market revolution remade many women’s economic roles, their legal status remained essentially unchanged. Upon marriage, women were rendered legally dead by the notion of coverture, the custom that counted married couples as a single unit represented by the husband. Without special precautions or interventions, women could not earn their own money, own their own property, sue, or be sued. Any money earned or spent belonged by law to their husbands.
• To be considered a success in family life, a middle-class American man typically aspired to own a comfortable home and to marry a woman of strong morals and religious conviction who would take responsibility for raising virtuous, well-behaved children. The duties of the middle-class husband and wife would be clearly delineated into separate spheres.
• The husband alone was responsible for creating wealth and engaging in the commerce and politics—the public sphere. The wife was responsible for the private—keeping a good home, being careful with household expenses, raising children, and inculcating them with the middle-class virtues that would ensure their future success. But for poor families, sacrificing the potential economic contributions of wives and children was an impossibility.