Cult Of Domesticity Essay

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Recommended: Womens roles in 1800-1920

The ‘cult of domesticity’ refers to a key aspect of the ‘Separate Sphere’s’ ideology. Though both these terms were explicitly mentioned and explained in ‘Home Sweet Home: The House and the Yard’, they can also be found in the novel ‘Pocho’ as well as in the article ‘Lucy’. What the ‘Separate Sphere’s’ ideology argues is that life can be compartmentalized into the private sphere of the home, the upkeep of which the responsibility of women, and the public sphere of the workplace, which took men away from the home due to industrialization (Jackson 383). The ‘cult of domesticity’ can be thought of as a summation of the attitudes and presumptions about women that served to justify the penchant to have them remain at home and deter them from paid …show more content…

In Pocho, Richard demonstrates a resistance to changes that urban middles class life had brought on his family, exemplified by his mother, who was becoming less subordinate to her husband (Villarreal 93). The effort he took to urge her to return to her former demeanour seems to parallel how the emergence of the cult of domesticity is described in ‘Home Sweet Home’: as a reactionary force against external changes. Yet even he was not interested in having his life centre around being the financial provider of a family, showing both his hypocrisy and the general struggle that comes from having to deal with a changing environment (Villarreal 64). The ‘cult of domesticity’ is significant to the theme of the theme of the course because it is an example of how, in the history of North America, three-part process of modernization is not so much a linear progression as it is a ‘moving’ equilibrium between the forces of change and countervailing reactions to

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