Beginning of Essay
, Harriet Jacobs’ appalling autobiographical narrative of her experience of slavery, is a story very much interwoven with the “cult of true womanhood.” Jacobs hardly embodied the ideal picture of true womanhood painted by white, middle-class Northeastern Am ....

Middle of Essay
.... birth of a new middle class in the early part of the nineteenth century, Northern women were experiencing a total reform of society. Nancy Woloch states in Women and the American Experience “middle class Americans had rising incomes, expectations, and living standards” (p.67). The atmosphere was charged with growth and transformation. It was out of this shift in society that the “cult of true womanhood” was born. This idyllic view of women’s appropriate sphere “celebrated the new status of the middle class woman, along with her distinctive vocation, values, and character” (Woloch, p.68). True Women reigned in the domestic realm, where ....