Femininity In Barbara Welter's The Cult Of True Womanhood

What Tandom may suggest is that a female is a cultural creation formed by the community they originate from, fulfilling the expectation of the society by following the code represented by the enforced standards of appearance, behavior and thought. Performative roles imposed on women usually led to suppression of the essential needs for one’s development and formed an ideology which scholars relate to as feminism. The term itself involves a broad domain of the study of women’s rights and their multiple roles shaped by gender, politics, or economy. Feminist approaches have played a significant role in the femininity (re)creation while being a manifestation of female self-awareness and willingness of being approached as a respected group. Such

Such a notion not only served it a greater social purpose as it gave more power to men who were seen as natural leaders, but at the same time formed gender identities while preserving the archetype of femininity and masculinity. According to Barbara Welter, a historian and author of The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860 (1966), the nineteenth century American society was a reflection of gender stereotypes where roles assigned to sex held women in the cultural manacles of subordination and limits. The work illustrates the gender boundary between men and women, while focusing on the hailed pure image of a housewife, who suppressed her instincts aspirations, and accepted the chores dictated by the cultural division supporting the policy governed by social hierarchy resulting in misogyny. In this fundamental for this thesis discourse, Barbara Welter provides various exemplars of limiting women’s development and pointed the route regarding little room for intellectual maneuver what translated into docile behaviour. The author writes that “submission was perhaps the most feminine virtue expected of