Early Nineteenth-Century Woman’s Sphere

Gender conventions, like so many other aspects of American life, changed dramatically in the nineteenth century. Developments in commerce, industry, and transportation reshaped the parameters of manhood and womanhood in the small towns and countryside of Addison County, Vermont. As men confronted an increasingly fluid, individualistic, and competitive public sphere, women and the domestic sphere came to represent moral virtue. As Nancy Cott observes, and as the experiences of women like Charity Bryant, Sylvia Drake, and Caroline and Rebecca Ford suggest, the doctrine of separate spheres afforded women a range of possibilities for public and private expression. While “piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness,” might have characterized a woman like Betsy Miner, young women like the Ford sisters left home to pursue factory work, while others like Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake explored a life of mutual devotion exclusive of heterosexual marriage. Even Betsy Miner, whose letters to her mother reflect a more conventional experience of domesticity, contributed to her family’s financial enterprises in sometimes unconventional ways.