ABSTRACT
Chapter Six addresses the place of respectability in the great humanitarian movements of the nineteenth century, above all antislavery. Although respectability affected these movements in several ways, the chapter concentrates on one: a constructed framework of images, ideas, attitudes, behaviors and especially discourses in which elements of respectability were represented as advancing humanity and civilization, the latter explicitly defined as the means by which humanity improves itself. This is called here the “mother-family-civilization connection.” Its central image was a woman: the respectable mother. In her role of moral educator, the respectable mother was the crucial factor in a respectable family, and respectable families were the foundation of a humane modern civilization. The chapter first examines an antislavery pamphlet published by William Wilberforce in 1823, which makes substantial use of respectable discourse but in which the “mother-family-civilization” connection is not significantly present. Attention then shifts to the principal vehicle through which antislavery came to be discursively tied to that connection: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Although Stowe does not disagree fundamentally with Wilberforce’s argument, her main rhetorical thrust is different: she appeals overtly to respectable mothers. Slavery, she says, is completely inconsistent with the performance by mothers of their most vital function, one upon which all meaningful civilization depends: raising and educating children to be morally competent, legitimately self-respecting, truly benevolent adults. She extends the argument by implication to include nearly all forms of healthy human interaction and assigns the capacity to be a good mother to practically all women, whether actual mothers or not. Stowe also presents a clear public role for respectable women: influencing the men in their families to act in accordance with the moral perspective on political and social matters that it is women’s responsibility to adopt. Stowe’s discursive performance is situated in the broader history of respectability by looking briefly at earlier formulations of the idea of the respectable mother as educator in the works of Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. The chapter then examines the impact of the “mother-family-civilization” connection on representations of gender in the second half of the nineteenth century. It analyzes Catharine Beecher’s argument that women’s management of their families and households should be recognized as a respectable profession and ends with a discussion of ways in which defining identities for respectable women in the public sphere also worked to shape public identities for respectable men.
