Pure Womanhood.

The restructuring of economic life in nineteenth-century America led to a rethinking of the roles that had traditionally been assigned to men and women. On family farms the two sexes worked side by side, but in the cities men brought in the family income while women raised the children and ran the household. The gradual expansion of the urban middle class produced a change in the way women were perceived: they came to be regarded as morally superior, but intellectually inferior, to men; they were seen as the standard- bearers of all that was pure and refined, their lives dedicated to creating a moral atmosphere in the home and maintaining a benevolent influence on their children. Women were not, therefore, to be contaminated by the corrupting influences of politics. Some historians have called this attitude the "cult of true womanhood...