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Domesticity: The Cult Of True Womanhood

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Domesticity: The Cult Of True Womanhood
The “Cult of True Womanhood/Domesticity” was a value system which prevailed in the upper/middle class women of the antebellum US, emphasising their role within the home as providing a safe and virtuous household as well as managing family dynamics and work life. Society believed women should posses the four cardinal virtues which encompassed piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. Significance in this showed the societal trend of placing all of the moral and ethical pressure onto the women, making the assumption that men lack self-control and are incapable of maintaining virtue if the women do not follow the parameters of the “cardinal virtues”, further emphasising a rather patriarchal and suppressive society towards women during the
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