Victoria's Secrets

". . . The ladies will do nothing until the gentlemen of the audience leave the house." And the men adjourned to leave this work with God and the women.

— Colonel Isaac Trimble¹

   The mid-1800s saw the beginning of the reign of the Victorian woman. During this period of history, new values for American culture had been set firmly in place for over half a century. Women had become the moral directors of society. American women came to believe that "the influence of woman is not circumscribed by the narrow limits of the domestick circle. She controls the destiny of every community; the character of society depends as much on the fiat of woman as the temperature of the country on the influence of the sun."²

   This is a critical period of national history from which most American men have never recovered. During the Age of Victoria, roles in crucial areas of social life were dramatically reversed. The Victorian period, by its very name, symbolizes feminine domination.

Page 120

The unofficial national emblem was an all-sovereign matriarch, Queen Victoria of England (1819-1901).

   The side effects of independence and the new time demands of commerce caused the boat of masculinity to take on water. But instead of bailing the water out and making repairs, men chose to jump ship. They made a deliberate decision to create new roles for themselves and their wives that would excuse them from the responsibilities of moral guidance for home and society. Men saddled women almost exclusively with the burden of being the collective moral conscience of America.

   For the first time, moral leadership and courageous acts of benevolence would no longer be viewed by America as masculine attributes. They would become women's work. For all practical purposes, men officially excommunicated themselves from the three most important spheres of social influence: the home, the school, and the church.

   A new gender system was created to validate that exile. American men sold their patriarchal birthright for a life of banishment on the island of politics and commerce. They copped out, exchanging true masculinity for a shallow, imitation manhood that would deteriorate into a futile sense of worthlessness and confusion. And this blurring of Victorian male identity is producing an early-twenty-first-century male who is more troubled about his manhood than his counterparts at any other time in American history.

Page 121

Steps in the Process

   As a pastor, I have spent countless hours with families who suffer under the great-great-grandsons of these Victorian men — husbands and fathers who have withdrawn into their workaday worlds. They are men who refuse to take responsibility. Their passivity and inaction affirm that spiritual leadership in their homes belongs to their wives. They are bankrupt men who dramatize their plight by dropping their wives and children off at church during the football season, thus signaling their sons that the spiritual world is for women and children.

   How did these new Victorian roles become the norm of the day? I have identified five steps that I think had a significant part in this process.

Step One: The Erection of the Pedestal

   If men were going to withdraw as the moral directors of society, others needed to fill the vacuum created by their retreat. Men did not want to get rid of all moral influence. They just wanted to shed the final responsibility for moral influence. And they found just the candidates for the job — Victorian women. So women — always equal in value to men in the eyes of God — were artificially elevated to a position of moral supremacy over men. This is the famed "pedestal" of the Victorian era.

   The women of the nineteenth century were extremely vulnerable in regard to their identity. Once a dynamic and essential part of the family's economic

Page 122

survival, women had been shamefully displaced by industrialization. Because they had been removed from the role of producer and relegated to that of consumer, their dignity and their sense of personal worth suffered greatly. They were ready for a cause. And the trip to the top of the Victorian pedestal set them on a course that would have a tremendous impact on American society.

   Partly because of time demands and the emergence of new priorities created by their obsession with the world of commerce, and partly to compensate dis-established women, men created a new "doctrine of spheres." Men would rule the workplace; women would rule the home and all the other spheres of moral influence, including the school and the church. To justify this radical new concept, Victorian men created a whole new gender system: They not only handed over their roles, but purposefully and systematically divorced themselves from virtually every meaningful area of moral responsibility. Men ruled politics and commerce. Women ruled everything else. The seeds of modern feminism were beginning to sprout.

   As Queen Victoria reigned powerfully over England and the rest of her empire, so would her American sisters rule over the hearts and minds of American men. At least that was the ideal. What an incredible paradox: the grandsons of men who rejected the reign of kings would be ruled instead by their own domestic queens!

   As Mary Ryan observes, "Invested with love and gentleness (not energy or power), women were suited

Page 123

to reign only in the domestic circle, on the throne of the heart. From their little kingdoms, however, women were assured that they could dictate national morality, preside over the tone of American culture as surely as Victoria reigned in England."³

   Hear me out: it was not the fault of the women. American men were the chief architects of this fantasy of Victorian feminism. There she stood, the Victorian woman regally perched on her pedestal with her pinched waist, swelled bosom, and layers of petticoats under her hooped skirt. Rarely soiling her tender hands by physical labor inside or outside the home, this new "lady" filled her days with strolling about or reading sentimental fiction and, of course, the Holy Bible, of which she had become the sole guardian. How could it be different? In the mind of the Victorian man, she had become "a gentle household divinity . . . the source and sacred fountain of our happiness."⁴

   The nineteenth-century American man looked upon this woman as a veritable domestic goddess who ensured an environment of purity for the offspring and a holy conscience for an entire nation. In contrast to the aggressive businessman or the unrefined factory worker, she was the embodiment of beauty and virtue. As Myron Brenton has written, "She was glorified. She was idealized. Her virtues were praised to the skies, and of faults she was deemed to have none."⁵

   Although no woman could fully achieve the ideal, this Victorian image was the goal to be pursued by the entire female population of America. Her exploits were

Page 124

dramatized and exaggerated in a flood of sentimental novels written by women, for women. Her virtues were even praised in pulpits across the nation, and her flowing words of civil piety were etched into the plaques that graced the walls of every Victorian home. This feminine mystique overwhelmed even the male heroes of the day.

Step Two: The Moral Surrender of Men

   The creation of this all-moral superwoman was achieved at tremendous cost to the Victorian man. He rolled over and played dead, for which he would pay dearly. The price for her inauguration would be his emasculation and feminization. Why? Because when he so cowardly bowed at the foot of the Victorian pedestal, he surrendered himself to be a moral number two to the opposite sex.

   Remember — in colonial times and earlier, men had been the moral examples and teachers for their families. But with the male cop-out, women replaced men in these roles, and, as Freidel writes, they "set their menfolk an example of superior moral excellence."⁶ Women, according to Rendall, were "increasingly assumed to be potentially closer to God. The prescriptive literature of the period emphasizes that latent moral superiority."⁷

   This new view of men and women permeated the entire nation through a flood of books and magazines that constantly reinforced the moral supremacy of women, as Mary Ryan notes:

Page 125

The mainstay of the national publishing industry was books for, about, and by women. For the first time in American history the topic of womanhood was among the central preoccupations of the national culture and had been standardized to obliterate local and regional variations. By the 1850s female readers were imbibing directives in femininity through the vicarious experience of sentimental novels.⁸

   From 1820 to 1860, book sales increased from $500,000 to $12,500,000.⁹ This avalanche of Victorian literature was aimed primarily at women. Why? Women, not men, were now the readers who were seeking to educate themselves for the new role of moral leader. That trend has not changed even to this day. This very book you are reading, written by a man about men, will be read by more women than men. Women aged twenty-five to forty-five account for seventy percent of book purchases in the United States.

Step Three: Women Take Over Home, School, and Church

   The stage was set. The actors were in place. As sociologist Peter Stearns says, "The role was, finally, new: Women had never before been granted moral supremacy."¹⁰

   The first realm that men surrendered to the benevolent rule of their newly crowned moral superiors was the domain of the once-patriarchal home. With patriarchal responsibilities increasingly superceded by

Page 126

the demands of industrialization, men of the Victorian era were away from home far too much to properly maintain their historical function. Stearns agrees: "A patriarchal approach to the family was one key to keep it separate from the competitive quality of the business world. Yet because the economic struggle was so demanding, businessmen lacked the time to extend patriarchal control over every aspect of the family operation."¹¹

   In addition, men were beginning to see that the values of the marketplace often conflicted with the values a father should want to instill in his family members. Stearns continues, "It was not a question of time alone. Many businessmen realized that they were consumed by a market mentality which, while fully justified, was not appropriate as the moral basis of the family."¹²

   Materialistic Victorian men found themselves faced with a dilemma. At work, competition was the key value; at home, cooperation was esteemed. In the factory, the personal welfare of workers was less important than making a profit; at home, nothing was more important than the welfare of the family members.

   The problems were very real. Men had no time left for their families. What were they to do? How were they to provide leadership? Simple! They had their wives do it. Rather than attempt to restructure the workplace in a way that would allow them to maintain their patriarchal duties, men restructured the home by effectively deserting it.

Page 127

   The groundwork for the twentieth-century fatherless home was set. For the first time, it was socially and morally acceptable for men not to be involved with their families. Before the close of the nineteenth century, notes Lawrence Fuchs in Family Matters,

An Englishman observed that while his countrymen were continually going home, American men were continually going to business. At home the American male was sometimes a playmate, occasionally a nullity, less and less an authority. It was at work that he usually made his presence and power felt. In 1912 a writer in a Paris newspaper asserted what other Europeans had been saying and thinking for generations: "While the American man rules in the business world, his wife rules at home."¹³

   While some trappings and patriarchal symbols remained as reminders of the past, the real power in the Victorian home shifted from men to women. The wife, so well endowed with grace, intuition, and a ready emotional sympathy, had as her mission to preside over the internal life of the house, whose well-being she ensured by her knowledge of domestic details. The man might take great pride in providing for the home, but would there be anything distinctly manly about being in it, now that it was his wife's domain?¹⁴

   Hardly. True acts of traditional manhood vanished when men abandoned their fatherly involvement with the family. Now, men had to come up with new

Page 128

routines in an attempt to preserve their identity as men. No longer able to relate in a normal role, men began to take on new and strange roles, frequently that of the wimp. Of the nineteenth century, Professor Ryan writes, "Observers of one middle-class neighborhood described the husbands of the district as a goaded, henpecked, and spineless crew."¹⁵

   Women soon discovered that the key to the kingdom of the home, given to them by men, also unlocked the door of the school. This predominant feminine influence upon America's children was applauded by the leading educators of the day. Horace Mann, the greatest liberal educational reformer of his time, was one of the first to experiment with free coeducational public schools and the mass training and recruitment of teachers. Who were these teachers? Increasingly, they were the women of America. Mary Ryan notes, "As public schools rapidly spread across the land in the wake of the Horace Mann experiments in Massachusetts, an army of women was trained to staff them. By 1890 there were 244,342 female teachers in the public schools, as compared with 124,449 male teachers."¹⁶

   Women controlled the newly formed classrooms of the public schools. As they did, men were displaced as the educators of America's children. As a child, I attended an elementary school named after the renowned Horace Mann. The army of women he had unleashed seemed to dominate our school as well. In my recollection, the only men on the staff were the principal and the janitor. This is a fairly common situation, since

Page 129

today over eighty-three percent of elementary teachers are women.¹⁷

   What is the significance of this educational history? During the Victorian era, irresponsible men dumped on the women of America the sole responsibility for two of the most powerful institutions for shaping the character of future generations — the home and the school. Men might retain some distant administrative control over these spheres, but feminine hands-on influence would begin to predominate, to personally and intimately form the actions and reactions of American children.

   The home and the school were not the only spheres of influence vacated by the men of America during the Victorian era. The third, and perhaps most critical, domain which Victorian men handed over to women was the Protestant Sunday school. In fact, women so completely dominated the Protestant churches that they virtually feminized them. Nancy Cott writes, "The 'feminization' of Protestantism in the early nineteenth century was conspicuous. Women flocked into churches and into church related organizations, re-populating religious institutions."¹⁸

   And as they did, the churches became more feminized. This not only means that women became the more numerous members and took on positions of leadership once held by men; it affected the way church life was expressed. Devotion was articulated in increasingly sentimental ways. Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, was addressed as "my dear sweet Jesus," a tone

Page 130

reflected in so many Protestant hymns today. It became more and more important to present theological truth in ways that did not hurt anyone's feelings. The tone of evangelism was often expressed in tearful begging. The feminine tone of church life made the church an increasingly uncomfortable place for men.

   As the church became feminized, ministers felt obliged to appeal openly to women to guard the home and even society at large from the moral bankruptcy of men. By their own hand, men became spiritually dependent upon women. Peter Stearns observes, "Not surprisingly, religious imagery stressing the woman as latter-day Eve, properly subordinate for her sin, yielded to that of women as redeemed and pure, to whom more worldly men were urged to look for their own spiritual guidance."¹⁹

   I cannot begin to relate how many women I have heard over the years talking about the need for their husbands to be the spiritual leaders of the home. Then, to my surprise, when their husbands began to take that responsibility, many of these same women resented it. Why? Because when men begin to establish spiritual leadership, they threaten women's role of moral supremacy. Women have been thoroughly schooled in Victorian thought for many years. To them, losing the spiritual leadership in the home also means losing control in the raising of their children. And look — I sympathize with them. It was we men who got them into this dilemma.

   This female domination of the religious and moral

Page 131

upbringing of children continues to this day. A Gallup Report on religion in America informs us that "the stronger influence on the average teen's religious and moral upbringing comes, by a very wide margin, from the mother. Nationally, fully 59% said their mother had exerted the strongest religious and moral influence, while only 16% named their fathers and 20% gave both parents equal credit."²⁰

   Some years ago, I went to a conference at a beautiful, remote Christian retreat center in Oregon. The dining room was filled with about thirty pastors, along with the camp director and his wife. Who gathered us in a circle, had us hold hands and sing a song I hadn't heard since Sunday school, and then led us in prayer?

   If you guessed it was one of the pastors, you're wrong. If you guessed it was the camp director, you're also wrong. I'm sure the camp director's wife is a fine woman, but obviously, like her Victorian sisters, she was one who had no qualms about stepping in and assuming a position of spiritual leadership — even at an all-male retreat. And our male silence implied that it was all right for her to do so.

   Since the nineteenth century, men have, in reality if not in words, abdicated the spiritual headship of their families to women. Victorianism saw spirituality crowned feminine. Women were seen as the last great bastion of the Christian Faith. One Protestant minister said, "I believe that if Christianity should be compelled to flee from the mansions of the great, the academies of the philosophers, the halls of legislators, or the throngs

Page 132

of busy men, we would find her last and purest retreat with women at the fireside; her last altar would be the female heart."²¹

   The most prominent place in the church where the power of feminine influence was demonstrated was the Protestant Sunday school. The opening and proliferation of Sunday schools dramatized the ministerial and feminine struggle for possession of sacred territory. Sabbath schools, begun in England in the later eighteenth century as a means of educating lower-class children, spread rapidly in America in the early nineteenth century. In 1817-18 the Sunday School Union had forty-three schools and 5,970 pupils: a scant six years later, it could boast 723 schools and 49,619 pupils. From its inception, the Union was funded largely by businessmen, but the most active promoters and organizers were ministers and women.²²

   The Victorian mold is even more firmly established in most Protestant churches today than it was in the nineteenth century. Women, not men, are sitting in the teacher's seat. This lack of male input is high on the list of what many young boys dislike about Sunday school. I don't say they hate their teachers, but they hate a feminized system that belittles their attempts to be masculine.

   When Victorian men gave Christian education over to women, that was only a part of the great spiritual abdication. Rufus B. Spain observes, "Even in such socially conservative denominations as the Southern Baptists, women were doing much of the work by the

Page 133

end of the century. They were the teachers in most of the Sunday School classes (except adult male classes), they were conducting most of the benevolent work of the churches, and they were promoting the mission program of the churches with very little assistance from the men."²³

Step Four: The Elevation of Motherhood over Fatherhood

   With the shift in roles, Victorian philosophy openly declared motherhood more important than, not just equal with, fatherhood. Feminist historian Nancy Cott notes:

Ministers fervently reiterated their consensus that mothers were more important than fathers in forming the tastes, sentiments, and habits of children, and more effective in instructing them. Their emphasis departed from the patriarchal family ideal in which the mother, while entrusted with the physical care of her children, left their religious, moral, and intellectual guidance to her husband.²⁴

   So great was this new influence upon the American culture that in 1833, educator V.S.C. Abbott wrote in his work, The Principles of Maternal Duty, that "mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined."²⁵

   It was because of this Victorian mindset that Mother's Day

Page 134

was officially recognized by the U.S. Congress in 1914 as a national observance. But the American obsession with Mother made itself felt throughout the year. It should come as no surprise that a day honoring fathers, while observed by some, did not become an official American observance until over half a century later.

   This preoccupation with Mother has never left us. We are reminded of it in the most subtle ways. Consider, for example, the contemporary phenomenon that is regularly seen on the television screen when the camera zooms in and selects the hero from a college or professional sporting event. Does he ever wave his hand and say, "Hi, Dad"? No way! In forty years, I've never seen it happen. The American jock always says, "Hi, Mom!" In fact, this is so noticeable that America's well-known comedian, Bill Cosby, has done an entire routine on this development.

   When men gave women control of children in once male-ruled spheres, they set the stage for even greater feminine dominance in society at large. The Victorian woman, whom men enthroned as the moral savior of the home, school, and church, expanded her domain to the poor, the disabled, and the helpless members of society.

Step Five: Women Take Responsibility for
Public Mercy and Moral Reform

   In earlier periods of American history, it had been a mark of manhood to care for the poor, the orphan, the

Page 135

widow, and the stranger. But male involvement in these areas as well all but disappeared in the Victorian era.

   "Once the civic duty of town fathers and poor-masters, subsequently the charge of the welfare state, the care of dependent populations was known as charity in the nineteenth century, and became the province of women," writes Mary Ryan.²⁶ The new Victorian gender images of men as hard and self-absorbed, and of women as calming and benevolent, set the philosophical stage for the abdication of male responsibility.

   Not too far into the nineteenth century, female charity and reform societies abounded, especially in the industrialized cities. Professor Ryan writes,

The larger cities offered women sufficient benevolent activity around which to build a full-time career. A young Boston woman named Susan Huntington, for example, belonged to the Female Orphan Asylum, the Graham Society, the Corban Society, the Female Bible Society, the Widow Society, the Boston Female Educational Society, and the Maternal Association. She served as an officer in at least three of these organizations. Thus, by 1830 female charity had become a major component of the urban social system. It would grow more comprehensive and entrenched as time went on.²⁷

   And who were the debased, wretched scoundrels who needed the reforming touch of these feminine movements? The men, of course. Again, Ryan notes:

Page 136

Almost all the female reform associations were implicit condemnations of males; there was little doubt as to the sex of slave masters, tavern-keepers, drunkards and seducers. One women's crusade, Female Moral Reform, made this assumption explicit and often in a virulent manner. It directed women's ire toward the American male and shouted as its battle cry, "Level your artillery at the head and heart of the debauchee."²⁸

   Do you see the significance of this change? In less than a century, irresponsible men, having handed over their obligation to care for the poor, deserted, and outcast souls of society to the "morally superior" women, became themselves the objects of these moral crusades. Since all men were suspected of being innately morally inferior to women, women felt justified in their assault on American masculinity and male vices of every kind. Women have continued to dominate social conscience movements to this day.

   Recently, a female caller on a local talk show asked the radio host, "Why do we never see Fathers Against Drunk Drivers? Why is it always women who carry the burden of these problems? Where are the men?"

   The radio host responded, "I don't know."  

Chapter 7  ||  Table of Contents

1. Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), p. 18.

2. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 115.

3. Ibid., pp. 114-15.

Page 137

4. Freidel, Changing Ideas, p. 170.

5. Brenton, American Male, p. 136.

6. Freidel, Changing Ideas, p. 168.

7. Rendall, Modern Feminism, pp. 74-75.

8. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 114.

9. Douglas, Feminization, p. 82.

10. Stearns, Be a Man, p. 87.

11. Ibid, p. 86.

12. Ibid.

13. Fuchs, Family Matters, p. 109.

14. Stearns, Be a Man, p. 107.

15. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 149.

16. Mary Earhart, Frances Willard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), p. 98.

17. Sexton, The Feminized Male, p. 29.

18. Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 132.

19. Stearns, Be a Man, p. 87.

20. "Religion in America," The Gallup Report No. 222, March, 1984, p. 76.

21. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, pp. 129-30.

22. Douglas, Feminization, pp. 111, 112.

23. Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), p. 169.

24. Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, p. 86.

25. Ibid., p. 85.

26. Ryan, Womanhood, p. 150.

27. Ibid., p. 151.

28. Ibid., p. 130.

Chapter 7  ||  Table of Contents