The Bonds of Womanhood:
“Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, Nancy F. Cott, Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1977
As I noted previously in a
review of Paul E. Johnson’s A Shopkeeper’s Millennium, an account of the rise
of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830’s, in any
truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a
central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has
created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the
question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that
demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution.
Any thoughtful socialist
wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were
formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of
useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of
E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs
to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman’s oppression, as
well. One does not, however, need to be
a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of
ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of
the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, leader by
the feminist resurgence, on woman’s history. The book under review here Nancy Cott’s
study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood,
is an early such addition.
I have mentioned in other
reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile
society at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial
society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the
case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function have
always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The
form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic
superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development,
as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the
putting out system, the dominance of the male as ‘breadwinner’ and the domestication
of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family
related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman
subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar?
Professor Cott makes her case
for this observable changes by looking at changes of various types of New England
families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She
also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left
behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological
problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the
relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early
would is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the
family that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America. I would note as a
sidelight that her digging up various self-help manuals for child-rearing and
other domestic responsibilities was quite interesting. Dr. Spock in the last
generation and today Oprah and Doctor Phil and their ilk thus come from a long
pedigree of those who had something to say about the correct raising of YOUR
children. Read on.
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