"Cult of True Womanhood" and American Catholic Sisters: An Example of Creative Subversion

Barbara Welter concludes her pathbreaking article, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860,” by declaring that “[Various forces in their lives] … called forth responses from woman, which differed from those she was trained to believe were hers by nature and divine decree. The very perfection of True Womanhood, moreover, carried within itself the seeds of its own destruction. For if woman was so very little less than the angels, she should surely take a more active part in running the world, especially since men were making such a hash of things” [174]. Traditionally, in both Welter’s original work and the many efforts that have subsequently followed, the living out of “True Womanhood” and the creative subversion it unintentionally inspired have been understood almost exclusively in either secular or Protestant contexts. This article explores the role of Catholic education by sisters in both reinforcing and undermining Victorian gender roles, and specifically analyzes the contributions of Catholic women religious to the complex and subversive process that Welter suggested. It analyzes the cultural and religious tensions that characterized nineteenth-century Catholic women’s education, as well as the women’s agency that, however inadvertently, it came to empower.

A Carefare Regime

Hungary’s anti-liberal government has invented a novel solution to the care crisis, which I call a “carefare regime”. This chapter describes four key features of the policies, policy practice and discourse that make up Hungary’s carefare regime. I argue that in contrast to welfare state models familiar from developed democracies, in post-2010 Hungary, women’s claims to social citizenship are most successfully made on the basis of doing care work. The state is re-engineered rather retrenched: services are not commodified but “churchified” in an effort to redistribute resources and build political loyalty. Women are constructed as “naturally” responsible for reproduction and care and this responsibility is tied to sentimentalized notions about femininity and true womanhood. In addition to providing care in the household, women are increasingly engaged in the paid labor market too, where the tolerance for gender inequality is officially mandated. A carefare regime provides limited financial advantages for a select group of women, while simultaneously increasing their devalued work burden both in and outside the household: it feeds a growing underclass of women workers.

The New Versus True Woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Ellen Glasgow’s Dare’s Gift

Given their opposition to Victorian conceptions of womanhood and domesticity, the literary works of Gilman and Glasgow have been a rallying point for women's emancipation and empowerment. Though the article touches upon several works by Gilman and Glasgow, it focuses particularly on the feminist viewpoints underpinning the transformation of female characters in Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Glasgow’s Dare’s Gift from true to new women. The purpose of both tales, the article contends, is to question and deconstruct the dominant Victorian patriarchal cult of true womanhood, which has confined women to the domestic sphere and constrained their freedoms and liberties The theoretical foundation for the examination of the two stories is laid out in the Introduction, which contrastively explores the conflicting paradigms of new and true womanhoods. The Discussion delves into the many reactions to the characters' defiant behavior, as well as the phallocentric interpretation of it.

No, Really

This chapter examines Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) and Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), representative black domestic novels, the genre that 1980s and 1990s black feminism used to usher black women’s literature into the canon. Refusing to treat black domestic fiction as a response to black women’s exclusion from the cult of true womanhood, this chapter highlights the trope of homemade citizenship, which has been overlooked because readers assume artistic works either protest injustice or ignore the reasons for protest. Both novels revolve around racial uplift, and because they define it as collective practices of making-oneself-at-home, they highlight the importance of the community conversation to help black women claim their right to every aspect of success, including romantic love. [121 of 125 words]