Manifest Domesticity

Given the sharp separation of spheres between men and women in 19th-century America, one would not expect women to play much of a role in the expansion of American power. Empire-building was man’s work, while women tended the heart-fires back home. In an award-winning 1998 article (pointed out to me by my colleague Chris Schlect), Amy Kaplan showed that the spheres were not divided in this fashion, that imperial symbols and rhetoric were employed in American discussions of domesticity, and that Americans played off the fact that “domesticity” had both a familial and a national connotation (as in “domestic policy”). Kaplan found it curious that domesticity was valorized at the very time that American embarked on a frantic expansive policy across the American continent. The two movements seem to be connected. (If nothing else, Kaplan’s title, “Manifest Domesticity,” deserves an award all by itself.)

Recent work, Kaplan acknowledged, had already deconstructed the two—sphere ideology by showing that “the private feminized that space of the home both infused and bolstered the public male arena of the market, and that the sentimental attached to maternal influence values were used to sanction women’s entry into the wider civic realm from which those same values theoretically excluded them.” Yet, “this deconstruction structural of separate spheres, however, leaves another opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign.” She proposed that we more accurately capture the 19th-century mentality if we place “domestic” in opposition to “foreign” in addition to its opposition to “political” or “public.”

She also proposed that the boundary of foreign and domestic was too static:

“The border between the domestic and foreign, however, also deconstructs when we think of domesticity static condition but as the process of domestication, not as a which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, the conditions and often become markers that distinguish of domesticity from savage.” Domesticization might be applied “domestically”: Child-rearing is a kind of domesticization of the savage tendencies of young children. Domesticization could be applied in domestic politics, as savage Indians were domesticated to American civilization. And, of course, the ultimate goal was the domesticization of the world, the elimination of savage nations and the creation of a global “home.”

Kaplan examined the work of Catherine Beecher and Sara Josepha Hale to show that and how this complex of ideas worked in the American imagination. One quotation from Beecher will suffice to illustrate: “The builders of a temple are of equal importance, labor on the foundations, whether they or toil upon the dome. Thus also with those labors that are to be made effectual in the regeneration of the Earth. The woman who is rearing a family of children; the woman who labors in the schoolroom, the women who, in her retired chamber, earns her needle,the mite to contribute for the and moral elevation of her country; even the humble domestic, whose example and influence may be molding and forming young minds, while her faithful services sustain a prosperous domestic state; – each and all may be cheered by the consciousness that they are agents in accomplishing the greatest work that ever to human responsibility. It is the building of a glorious temple, whose base shall be coextensive with the bounds of the earth, whose summit shall pierce the skies, whose splendor shall beam on all lands, and those who hew the lowliest stone, as much as those who carve the highest capital, will be equally honored when its top-stone shall be laid, with new rejoicing of the morning stars, and shoutings of the sons of God.”

To that Babelic vision, one can only say “Wow.”