The Revolutionary-era idea of republican motherhood is in some sense the precursor of domestic ideology. The Enlightenment concept that youth was particularly susceptible to both good and bad influences led late eighteenth-century American educators like Judith Sargent Murray and Benjamin Rush to argue that in their capacity as mothers women exercised a tremendous power over the fate of the Republic in the values they taught boys who would grow up to lead the nation. It was therefore necessary, argued these writers, to pay more attention to women's education than had previously been given, lest mothers communicate undemocratic tendencies to their male offspring.
Whereas Murray and Rush attempted to incorporate women into the ongoing Revolutionary project by representing men and women as equally capable of contributing to the moral well-being of the Republic, early nineteenth-century writers increasingly represented women as the sole repository of virtue in society. At the same time that they began characterizing men as naturally aggressive, sensual, and godless, authors of countless sermons, newspaper articles, and treatises began to argue that if through their relations with fathers, husbands, and sons in the home women did not exercise a civilizing influence on men, society would collapse into complete anarchy. In one of the scores of sermons bearing the title "Female Influence"-115- written in the period, the Reverend J. F. Stearns proclaimed to his women parishioners in 1837: "Yours it is to decide. . whether we shall be a nation of refined and high minded Christians, or whether. . we shall become a fierce race of semi-barbarians."
While such theories of female influence claimed that women ultimately controlled society, they also stressed that women exercised that power through indirect influence rather than through direct force. If a woman attempted to influence society directly — through, for example, winning the right to vote — she would lose her control over men, since brute force rather than moral suasion governed the political realm. Woman's physical delicacy would prevent her from battling with men on their own terrain, it was argued, and hence it was in her own best interest to remain within her "proper sphere."
For some writers, however, even moral suasion within her proper sphere was too direct a manifestation of woman's power. Child's 1831 treatise The Mother's Book(a somewhat more philosophical statement than The American Frugal Housewife, which Child published one year earlier) asserts that it is better for mothers to instruct through the example of their own virtuous behavior rather than through precept. Its dialogic form made narrative a particularly appropriate vehicle for what the age defined as women's proper exercise of power. Child (herself a novelist) recommended the reading of uplifting fiction, but she took care to distinguish uplifting fiction from fiction with a "good moral": "The morality should be in the book," she wrote, "not tacked upon the end of it." No doubt Cummins was thinking of the educational uses to which her own work might be put when, in The Lamplighter (1854), she describes Emily Graham judiciously selecting uplifting narratives of the "triumph of truth, obedience and patience" for Gerty Flint to read. This method of inculcating moral principles in her willful ward conforms with Emily's more general commitment to exerting her authority only covertly — a method contrasted with her father's disastrously manifest exertions of his authority. Emily, writes Cummins, "preached no sermons, nor did she weary [Gerty] with exhortations and precepts. Indeed, it did not occur to Gerty that she [was being] taught anything; but simply and gradually [Emily] imparted light to the child's dark soul." Because narrative was not considered rhetorical (rhetoric being associated with the "masculine" political sphere), novel writing was seen as -116- a particularly appropriate way for women to exert their indirect influence for the good of society.
The cult of domesticity and its appropriation of the genre of the novel provide a cultural context in which to understand Hawthorne's comment that America had been taken over by a mob of scribbling women (a comment that, by the way, was prompted specifically by the success of The Lamplighter). Hawthorne's overstatement of the case was informed as much by his culture's belief in the feminization of American society as it was by his own professional jealousy. In fact, in The Scarlet Letter, five years before writing the letter to his publisher, Hawthorne suggested that in American society the masculine-identified characteristics of Puritan times (the physical vigor and moral callousness of the Puritan elders) had given way to feminine-identified qualities of antebellum times (the exquisite delicacy and sensitivity of the narrator of "The Custom-House," which is presaged by the nervous behavior of the Puritan male hysteric Arthur Dimmesdale).
The theory that society had grown more feminine was by no means limited to male novelists of the period. One could argue that male writers manifested more hostility toward the changes they perceived than did most women writers, a hostility that they evidenced in their fondness for narrating the flight of male characters into the wilderness or out to sea (and thus away from the rule of women); however, a novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) suggests that it is more complicated than this. Like The Scarlet Letter, Stowe's local color tale is set in Puritan times (its titular "pearl" Mara Lincoln in fact recalls Hawthorne's character Pearl). Stowe's narrator, coyly prophesying the situation that nineteenthcentury Americans felt increasingly characteristic of their own century, associates seventeenth-century New England with the haughty masculinity of the young Moses Pennel and suggests: "There may, perhaps, come a time when the saucy boy, who steps so superbly, and predominates so proudly in virtue of his physical strength and daring, will learn to tremble at the golden measuring-rod, held in the hand of a woman." As an adolescent, Moses begins to chafe at the virtuous Mara's "apron strings" and goes to sea to sow his wild oats — an act of rebellion that anticipates Huck Finn's decision at the end of Mark -117- Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) "to light out for the Territory" in order to evade Aunt Sally's "sivilizing" designs on him. One might argue that women's novels already contain the narratives of male rebellion against the rule of women that are generally associated with male writers. In other words, far from challenging the principles of domestic ideology, male narratives of rebellion against women's rule merely reinforce domesticity's association of men with "semi-barbarism" and women with "high minded" Christianity. Similarly, one could argue that theories of the American Renaissance that represent the classic male novelists as rebels against the acceptable conventions of a literary marketplace controlled by women merely perpetuate the belief in the moral inequality of the sexes fundamental to domestic ideology.
The cult of domesticity may have become culturally dominant by the mid-nineteenth century, but it is important to bear in mind that, at least in its origins, it was an oppositional ideology. Domesticity's origins are explicitly antipatriarchal, and while to argue this is not the same thing as arguing that domesticity was feminist, it does explain why so many women took up the pen in behalf of a philosophy that seems, from a contemporary perspective, so at odds with women's political, economic, and personal independence.
Domesticity proceeds from a critique of the commodification of womanhood in the aristocratic patriarchal family. Jean-Jacques Rousseau captures the spirit of the patriarchal view of womanhood when he, in his cursory treatment of female education in Emile (1762), explains the difference between male education and female education as the difference between "the development of strength" and "the development of attractiveness." Responding in part to Rousseau in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), British educator Hannah More (who is generally credited with the founding of domestic ideology) criticized her contemporaries for educating their daughters "for the world, and not for themselves." Patriarchal interests dictated the shape of the system of female education More wanted to reform. Consisting almost exclusively in ornamental graces requisite for obtaining an advantageous familial alliance through the marriage contract, this education, More felt, treated women as little more than commodities bought and sold -118- on the marriage market. Rousseau expressed the degree to which women were raised "for the world" rather than for themselves when he argued that a woman's knowledge and powers of reasoning should be developed only enough so as to prevent her from being tedious in conversation with her husband. Using the home as a metaphor for interiority (in the sense of "selfhood"), More was attempting to redefine woman's value in terms of internal qualities: sound judgment, knowledge of how to run a household, moral tendencies — qualifications that suited a woman to be a good wife and mother rather than merely making her satisfying to the male gaze.