Angels in the market

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best-known as the author of the antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin(1852), a book that James Baldwin later christened the ‘cornerstone of American social protest fiction’. It might also be considered the nec plus ultraof American sentimental fiction – and for that reason a ‘very bad novel’, according to Baldwin. Stowe hoped her treacly tale would open the nation’s eyes to the evils of slavery by melting the hearts of its white readers.

Beecher Stowe is less well-known as the author of a popular Victorian homemaker’s manual coauthored with her sister Catharine Beecher, The American Woman’s Home, or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, and Christian Homes(1869). In it, she counsels housewives on how to fulfil their function as ‘angels in the house’, the moral voice of the middle-class white American family. That Stowe should prove a standout in two such different genres might appear odd to 21st-century eyes. But to the 19th-century reader, the bridge between the two genres would have been obvious: it was the power that Americans then accorded to white women’s feelings as markers of virtue and agents of salvation, both within the private family circle and in the larger sphere of ‘community housekeeping’. White women’s status as beacons of maternal sentiment aligned, briefly, with public action and liberal social reform.

It was not to last. Over the course of the 20th century, the nation’s evolving economic system worked to strip white women’s feelings of their potentially transformative political force, redirecting them, instead, into private displays of sympathy. We recognise it today as white virtue signalling. Tre Johnson in The Washington Postrecently called it America’s ‘racial ouroboros’: ‘a time loop where my white friends and acquaintances perform the same pieties over and over again’, joining book clubs, ‘owning’ their white privilege on social media, ‘checking in on’ Black friends, and then going back to business as usual. The purely performative nature of much white sentimental allyship – and in particular, the systematic redirection of ‘well-meaning’ white women’s feelings away from the public sphere – has a long history. We would do well to revisit it today.


Many Americans were appalled by the ethos of unregulated capitalism that the Industrial Revolution unleashed in the 1840s and ’50s. The brutal market logic dictated that, to succeed, a man had to be willing to ride roughshod over his neighbours. The domestic sphere, where the old communal values of selflessness and Christian charity still held sway, emerged as a counterweight, and one whose virtue the Beecher sisters made it their business to extol in The American Woman’s Home. Unlike men, who ‘toil for wealth, honour and power … mainly for earthly, selfish advantages’, the Beechers lectured, a woman was the ‘chief minister’ of the Christian home who taught ‘all under her care to lay up treasures, not on earth, but in heaven’. The middle-class married couple thus formed a moral tag team: if the husband had no choice but to earn his bread in the morally bankrupt marketplace, he at least found solace in knowing that his wife back at home was holding a torch for lost virtue.

This cultural sleight of hand whereby Americans made peace with the structural violence of the marketplace was a devil’s bargain from the beginning, as Ann Douglas expertly analysed in The Feminization of American Culture(1977). ‘Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated,’ she observed of the 19th-century cult of sentiment. And if it is to the credit of 19th-century Americans that they acknowledged what they forfeited by embracing the new capitalist world order, ‘the fact remains that their regret was calculated not to interfere with their actions.’ Women’s feelings provided an alibi for the misdeeds of market society.

Still, some women pushed to make a stand against capital in real rather than symbolic terms. The Victorian woman’s status as angel in the house and caretaker of all God’s children gave her tacit permission to do public or ‘community housekeeping’ on behalf of the socially marginalised: immigrants, the poor, Black people. Following in the footsteps of Stowe’s abolition activism, 19th-century women activists were among the first in the country to call attention to the ills of urban industrialised society as structural rather than individual in nature, a product of bad institutions rather than bad souls.