Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!usc!aero!nadel
From: nadel@aerospace.aero.org (Miriam H. Nadel)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Book Review: "Just a Housewife" by Glenna Matthews
Message-ID: <60032@aerospace.AERO.ORG>
Date: 24 Oct 89 16:37:51 GMT
Reply-To: nadel@aero.UUCP (Miriam H. Nadel)
Organization: The Aerospace Corporation, El Segundo, CA
Lines: 37
Approved: nadel@aerospace.aero.org


_"Just a Housewife"_ (Yes, the quotation marks are in the title) is the most
recent of a number of feminist analyses of the history of domesticity in
America.  It differs from previous studies (e.g. S. Strasser's _Never Done_,
R. Cowan's _More Work for Mother_ and L. Shapiro's _Perfection Salad_) in
being primarily a cultural history, rather than a social history, i.e. it
focuses on what influential people were saying about domesticity more than on
what ordinary people were doing.  The aim of this book is to explore how
domesticity became valued in mid-19th century America and how the home became
devalued around the turn of the century.

One of the fundamental points that Matthews makes is that, prior to the 19th
century, fathers were considered to have moral authority over their families.
The rise of domesticity is associated with the notion of the mother as the
primary moral authority within the home.  This inevitablly led to male
resentment (e.g. one of the issues behind Prohibition was a male/female
conflict, exemplified by the WCTU asserting women's moral "rights" to control
male behavior) with the denigration of feminine values.

The conflict is relevant to modern feminism.  The early leaders of the domestic
movement saw themselves as feminists, trying to bring "female" values to
the world.  Modern feminism faces the same conflict in different terms.
Matthews attempts to show how the "material feminists" of the 19th century
destroyed their own chances of success by overemphasis on separate spheres.
[We see this conflict in the 20th century in discussions over how feminism
should deal with men.  If we dismiss the importance of discrimination against
men in domestic matters, e.g. child custody, we fall into the trap of
denigrating the importance of traditional female roles.]

Where Matthews fails is in her explanations of why changes arose.  She
documents attitudes well, and includes rationalizations about how they
fit into other social movements (e.g. she discusses the influence of
social darwinism on attitudes towards women).  But she leaves too many
questions unanswered, particularly by ignoring the issue of why "men's"
work was industrialized before most "women's" work was.

Miriam Nadel