Volume 24, Number 12 · July 14, 1977
American Women in Their Place
By Willie Lee Rose
The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835
by Nancy F. Cott
Yale University Press, 225 pp., $12.50
The Feminization of American Culture
by Ann Douglas
Knopf, 403 pp., $15.00
The achieving female of a hundred years ago has presented problems as a model for her achieving feminist successors of our times. A fair assessment, for instance, of someone like Catharine Beecher, a front-running celebrant of the 'cult of domesticity,' would be less galling if her contributions to women's education had not been accompanied by so much emphasis on the special place of women in the home; in much the same way that Booker T. Washington's similar achievements would have been admired more had Washington not shown a seeming acquiescence in the social segregation of blacks.
Review, 3068 words
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