Exploring the Cult of True Womanhood: Roles and Rights of Women

This essay examines the Cult of True Womanhood, a 19th-century value system prevalent among the middle and upper classes in the United Kingdom and the United States. This ideology emphasized piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness as the defining characteristics of womanhood, positioning women as the center of the family and the light of the home. The essay highlights the contradictory nature of this ideal, where women were simultaneously elevated and restricted, particularly concerning educational opportunities and participation in the labor market. The annotated bibliography includes primary, secondary, and media sources to provide a comprehensive overview of the topic, including the impact of the Civil War and challenges to the cult's principles. The analysis concludes that while some may see positive aspects of this ideology, it ultimately contributed to the suppression of women's rights and opportunities during that era.

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Cult of True Womanhood
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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Argumentative essay
The cult of true womanhood is a particular term used to explain what they believed to
have been in a value system among the middle and the upper class citizens of United
Kingdom and United States. According to those set of ideas, the woman were the symbols of
purity, piety, domesticity and submissiveness. Due to idea women achieved the stature of
being in the centre of the family and the bright light of a home, and it was perceived that a
woman could make a house a home (Field, 2017). On the other hand, there were some
regulations regarding women’s right to take admissions in universities in order to prevent
them from criticizing the learning of the church. Thus it can be said that the position of
women were never transparent at that point of time. Sometimes women in the society were
used to held high as a light of a home, and on the other hand women had no chance to read
further to be able to criticize the age old learning. The cult of womanhood hugely influenced
the women’s participation in labor market in the nineteenth century. They were supposed to
get engaged in domestic works and they had no right to get engaged in any paid jobs
(Middleton, 2013). At that point of time only the lower class women had the chance to work
for money outside the house.
Thus to conclude, it can be said that at that point of time some individuals said that
women had a huge status in domestic environment and they are the light of a home. Those
ideas in a way suppressed women from getting their fundamental rights and they were utterly
deprived of many opportunities at that point of time. Some scholars might find good aspects
of the situation, but on the other hand there are various instances where the scholars directly
blamed these ideologies of the society behind the sufferance and pains of the women of that
point of time in UK and in US.

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Annotated Bibliography
Secondary
UR Rehman, F., & Hussain, Y. (2016). Victorian Patriarchal Politics: The Rise and Fall of
the Legend of True Womanhood. PUTAJ-Humanities and Social Sciences, 23(2), 43-54.
This particular journal is a secondary source where the authors have collected data
from the work of Barbara Welter (1966). The journal is about the Victorian society where the
focus is on righteousness of women and thus the women were expected to be pure and ideal.
The Victorian people made proper arrangements for the educating the women: and awakened
the fundamental virtues of true womanhood among the Victorian women. In those days, the
women were seen as symbol of piety, purity and domesticity. This particular journal
challenges the notion of true womanhood that is seen in various literatures, socio-political
practices and most importantly in religion. Thus the journal has a strong connection with the
cult of true womanhood.
Primary source
Marshall, J. E. (2017). The Recovery of Paul's Female Colleagues in Nineteenth-century
Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 33(2), 21-36.
This journal is about the 19th century women who did not get the chance to get
admission in Universities to study Biblical languages and Higher Criticism. The journal
explores the work of Ellen Battelle Dietrick who challenged the Church and the academic
interpretation of Paul’s female colleagues. Influenced by their ideologies which were
influenced by the learning of church, culture of America and the movements regarding
Women’s rights; they got engaged in various arguments and criticized the gender biasness of

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old society. In this way the Ellen interpreted the primary sources and created arguments
regarding the cult of true womanhood.
Media source
WSKG. (2017). The Civil War And Challenging the “Cult of True Womanhood”. [online]
Available at: http://wskg.org/history/the-civil-war-and-challenging-the-cult-of-true-
womanhood/ [Accessed 3 Dec. 2017].
The notion of cult of womanhood was initially developed in the early 19th century and
it bounded the women’s virtue to domesticity and submissiveness. It can be said that the cult
of womanhood was an integral part of the separate spheres philosophy. This particular
philosophy divided the world into two parts; Men (public) and women (private). This idea of
domesticity of women is somewhat a shameful separation and the subsequent civil war
brought in various changes in these philosophies.

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References and bibliography
Field, F. K. (2017). Snipping Separate Spheres: The Cult of Domesticity in Gertrude Stein's"
Tender Buttons".
Marshall, J. E. (2017). The Recovery of Paul's Female Colleagues in Nineteenth-century
Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 33(2), 21-36.
Martin, M. E. (2017). Controlling the Mind for the Body: The Deintellectualization of
Women within the American Gothic. In Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature
and Visual Culture (pp. 159-168). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Middleton, A. (2013). Missionization and the cult of domesticity, 1769–1850: local
investigation of a global process. In Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on
Gender Transformations (pp. 149-170). Springer New York.
UR Rehman, F., & Hussain, Y. (2016). Victorian Patriarchal Politics: The Rise and Fall of
the Legend of True Womanhood. PUTAJ-Humanities and Social Sciences, 23(2), 43-
54.
WSKG. (2017). The Civil War And Challenging the “Cult of True Womanhood”. [online]
Available at: http://wskg.org/history/the-civil-war-and-challenging-the-cult-of-true-
womanhood/ [Accessed 3 Dec. 2017].