ideology is not merely a statistical norm. It is transformed and given an explanation in terms of natural differences and natural causes. We explain the sexual division of labor as an outgrowth of physical differences. We see the family as a natural, rather than a social, creation. In general, we do not see the social organization of gender as a product or aspect of social organization at all. The reification of gender, then, involves the removal of all imputation of historicity and all sense that people produce and have produced its social forms.
An ideology of nature that sees women as closer to nature than men, or as anomalies neither natural nor cultural, remains fundamental.15 In our society, moreover, the particular ideology of nature that defines the social organization of gender generally, and women’s lives in particular, bases itself especially upon interpretations and extensions of women’s mothering functions and reproductive organs. Historians have described how industrial development in the capitalist United States relegated women to the home and elevated their maternal qualities, as nurturant supporters and moral models for both children and husbands. Ruth Bloch has examined American magazines from the latter part of the eighteenth century to trace the origins of this nineteenth-century ideology.16 During the late colonial period, magazines assigned no special weight to the role of mother, either in relation to women’s other roles or in contrast to the role of father. Women were rational mothers, part of a rational parenting pair, along with their other housewifely duties. Around 1790, however, in conjunction with the growth of increasingly impersonal competitive work engaged in by husbands, a sentimental image of the “moral mother” came to dominate and take over from previously dominant images of women—images Bloch calls the “delicate beauty” and the “rational housewife.” The moral mother incorporated some of the traits of her predecessors while giving these new meaning:
Like the rational housewife, she was capable, indispensable, and worthy of respect. Like the delicate beauty, however, she was wonderfully unlike men, intuitive as opposed to rational, and, therefore, also the subject of sentimental idealizations.17
Magazines extolled the involvement and importance of mothers in the production of worthy sons. But they also suggested that women play a similar maternal role for their husbands. Bloch concludes:
This view of a man’s wife as providing him with crucial emotional support fed into a conception of woman as essentially “mother,” a role which in the magazines of the 1790s began to receive effusive praise for its indispensable and loving service to the human race.18
Thus, the virtues of mother and wife collapsed into one, and that one was maternal: nurturant, caring, and acting as moral model. This rising image of women as mother, moreover, idealized women’s sexlessness, pointing further to the assimilation of wife to mother in the masculine psyche.
The moral mother was a historical product. She “provided the love and morality which enabled her husband to survive the cruel world of men.”19 As this world grew crueler with nineteenth-century industrial development, both the image of the moral mother and attempts to enforce it grew as well. Barbara Welter describes its apogee in the “cult of true womanhood.”20 Women’s magazines and books expounded upon this cult, and women discussed it in diaries, memoirs, and novels. Bourgeois women of the nineteenth century were expected to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic—again, to provide a world of contrast to the immoral, competitive world of their husband’s work and a place where their own children (more especially their sons) could develop proper moral qualities and character. Because of this, compliance with the requisites of maternal morality was not left to chance. Medical practices defined bourgeois women as sexless and submissive by nature. They explained deviation from this norm (women’s resistance and assertions of self) as medically caused. Doctors, upon husbandly suggestion or on their own, extirpated sexual and reproductive organs of women who were too sexual and aggressive and who thereby threatened men’s control of women and the careful delineation of sexual spheres.21
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