THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CULT OF DOMESTICITY

During Catherine’s reign, Russians who followed intellectual trends in Western Europe became aware that a powerful critique of the Enlightenment was brewing. Dominant systems of ideas and behavior often provoke reactions, resulting in the diversion or even the temporary choking‑off of liberating energies, which may emerge only many decades later in altered forms. Such was the case with the Enlightenment, which generated so many theories of liberation, rationalism, and progress, and yet which ended in the later eighteenth century in a reaction that touted the worth of traditional customs, religion, romantically intuitive ways of knowing, and revised gender values.

This counter‑revolution played itself out in women’s history through a critique launched against the Enlightenment’s impact on women’s education and social behavior. The Swiss philosopher Jean‑Jacques Rousseau, by his own testimony solitary and egocentric, was the pioneer of this critique. Rousseau and a growing number of like‑minded social critics began by charging that noblewomen were spending too much time socializing and dabbling in intellectual activities. Partying, they asserted, led to immorality, and reading to addled female minds; the dreadful result was that women were neglecting their children and encouraging their husbands’ frailties. How else to explain the rampant immorality, especially among the frivolous, decadent aristocracy? But there was a remedy. Women could play a crucial role in getting society back on the right track by devoting themselves to their homes and families. Safe within the domestic circle, far from the corruptions of the public world, they could cultivate their natural piety, teach their children to be moral people and good citizens, and provide support to their husbands. By building stable families, women would contribute to stability in the society at large.

For centuries Europeans had believed that ideal women devoted themselves to their menfolk and their families. The cult of domesticity updated those core ideas in response to the political and social realities of the eighteenth century. But it contained new ideas too, chief among them its assertion that women possessed an innate sense of right and wrong. And this was important, for earlier gender codes, as we have seen, taught that women were less capable of understanding morality than men were. Proponents of the cult of domesticity strenuously disagreed, maintaining instead that women could serve as moral guides for their husbands and children. They argued that the ideal women was a loving, self‑sacrificing, pious anchor of happy families and rearer of the next generation of pious, ethical citizens. They valued women’s economic contribution to their families’ welfare less than thinkers of the past, perhaps because the development of markets and manufacturing in Western Europe was reducing the amount of income‑generating work that was performed in the homes of the propertied.

Early in the nineteenth century, the cult of domesticity became the dominant European conception of women’s nature and roles, even though its prescriptions for homemaking and childrearing could only be followed by the small minority of women who did not have to contribute to the economic support of themselves and their children. We have already seen its influence at work in late eighteenth‑century Russia, in Catherine’s revision of the curriculum of the Smolny Institute. The cult of domesticity was also proclaimed by Russian writers, particularly poets, during Catherine’s reign. The empress sent mixed messages on women’s domestic mission, for she was also deeply committed to their participation in intellectual and cultural life. Her successors, particularly her conservative grandson, Nicholas I, emperor of Russia from 1825 to 1855, were another story.