The Bonds of Womanhood: Woman's Sphere in New England, 1780-1835: With a New Preface

by Nancy F. Cott

Book Overview

This twentieth anniversary edition of Nancy F. Cott's acclaimed study includes a new preface in which Cott assesses her own and other historian's development of the concept of domesticity from the 1970s to the 1990s.

"Nancy Cott's Bonds of Womanhood is not just a pioneer work in women's history. It is a classic. Despite all the work published since, it is still an essential starting place for understanding New England in the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300072988
• ISBN13: 9780300072983
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Turning Space and Roles Over its Head

Nancy Cott in The Bonds of Womanhood extends E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class to build on a sense of the development of the forms of woman's oppression. In this book, Cott studies the role of women in early capitalist America. Recognizing her methodological limitations of her approach as well as her propensity to take a broad view while examining a small numbers of records, she nevertheless uses her archive as a starting point to appreciate the changes that occurred with the rise of capitalism in America during the lat 18th and early 19th century. According to Cott, examines societal changes during a set period (1785 to 1830) looking at different types of New England families (mostly middle-class), though oral histories and records left behind by women -- primarily through their diaries. Cott posits that the market revolution in early America created a separate women's "sphere" of domesticity that acted as a proto-feminist "space." She further writes that women positioned (or where positioned) into a separate "private sphere." This private sphere, Cott argues, can be termed the "cult of domesticity." She concludes by making the claim that the cult of domesticity allowed women to forge bonds through churches and fellow homemakers (via correspondence) that helped bring about the proto-feminist movements of the early 19th century. In my opinion, the book is a more complex view of women and women's history. Cott argues that while some acted as victims, others resisted, while yet other found agency in through and in her spacio-temporal location (Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood 197-202).

Women in the Rise of American Capitalism

As I noted previously in a review of Paul E. Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium, an account of the rise of the industrial capitalists of Rochester, New York in the 1830's, in any truly socialist understanding of history the role of the class struggle plays a central role. However, the uneven development of society throughout history has created other forms of oppression that need to be address. In America the question of the special oppression of blacks as a race clearly fits that demand. And everywhere the woman question cries out for solution. Any thoughtful socialist wants to, in fact needs to, know how the various classes in society were formed, and transformed, over time. I have mentioned previously that a lot of useful work in this area has been done by socialist scholars. One thinks of E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class, for example. One needs to have a sense about the evolution of the forms of woman's oppression, as well. One does not, however, need to be a socialist to do such research in order to provide us with plenty of ammunition in our fight for a better world. One of the great developments of the past thirty or forty years is the dramatic increase in research, led by the feminist resurgence, on woman's history. The book under review here Nancy Cott's study of the role of women in early capitalist America, The Bonds of Womanhood, is an early such addition. I have mentioned in other reviews of this period in American history that the changes from an agrarian/mercantile society as found at the time of the American Revolution to the contours of an industrial society in the Age of Jackson were dramatic and longstanding. This was also the case with the role of women. Women, due to their biological function, have always been central to the cohesion of the family throughout class history. The form that has taken however has varied with changes in the economic superstructure. Thus such occurrences, due to the nature of industrial development, as the decrease in extended families, the dividing of work from the home, the putting out system, the dominance of the male as `breadwinner' and the domestication of women as center of family life had profound changes in the way the family related to the world, the way children were socialized and the way woman subordinated their desires and creativity to the tasks at hand. Sound familiar? Professor Cott makes her case for this observable change by looking at changes of various types of New England families from self-sufficient farmers to producers for the market, etc. She also relies heavily, as all historians of necessity must, on the record left behind by women mainly through their diaries. There are certain methodological problems inherent in that approach and a tendency to generalize off of the relatively small numbers for whom a record survives but nevertheless her early work is the starting place for a better understanding of the crisis in the family that occurred with

Clear, concise, and engrossing

When I first began to read 'The Bonds of Womenhood' I found the concepts general and the progress slow. Despite this slow start, Nancy Cott's work soon pulls you in to her convincing arguments and compelling presentation. By the conclusion one can appreciate the structure of the argument as much as the message, history, and interpretation she conveys in the text. I recommend this book to those who wish to begin a modern and fair interpretation of Gender history and Women's issues. There are few scholarly books that are enjoyable to read and this one in particular is commendable.

Groundbreaking work in women's history

Cott argues that the market revolution in early America brought about the creation of a seperate women's "sphere" of domesticity. She further contends that the placement of women in a seperate "private sphere." can be termed the "cult of domesticity" She concludes by making the claim that the cult of domesticity allowed women to forge bonds through churches and fellow homemakers which helped bring about the first femenist movements of the early nineteenth century. The work stands as the primer for the revisionists' view of new women's "anti-victimization" history.