ABSTRACT
The “Victorian Age” ended in Great Britain about 1870. As that land moved into an era of high imperialism, great wealth, popular Darwinism, and liberalism, there was less emphasis on the sanctified home, large families, evangelical restraint, and woman as “the Angel in the House.” 1 Victorian ideals of this sort remained dominant in the American popular culture for another decade or so. Sarah Hale stood at the helm of Godie’s Lady’s Book until her death in 1879, continuing to insist that woman was God’s moral agent on earth and the home, not the public sphere, her battleground. Catherine Beecher continued to be among America’s best-selling authors until her death in 1878. Her later books—The American Woman’s Home (1869; co-authored with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe), Principles of Domestic Science as Applied to the Duties and Pleasures of Home (1870), and Woman’s Profession as Mother and Educator, with Views in Opposition to Woman Suffrage (1871)—reinforced her opposition both to the intrusion of industrial capitalism into social relations and to political liberalism. Until the end, she held that “[w]oman’s profession embraces the care and nursing of the body in the critical periods of infancy and sickness, the training of the human mind in the most impressible period of childhood, . . . and most of the government and economies of the family state.” The home stood as “the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister.” 2
