Women's history in the new millennium: a retrospective analysis of Barbara Welter's "The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820-1860".(Brief Article)

There may be no more frequently cited article than Barbara Welter's analysis of ideals for white middle-class northern urban American women in the early nineteenth century. Welter's exploration of prescriptive literature has since prompted considerations of the impact of the expectations of "True Womanhood" on other groups of women, and the concept of a societal ideal propagated at the very time that conditions for women were undergoing change has had resonance beyond the field of U.S. women's history.

Often criticized (unfairly, I would argue) for focusing on an ideal accessible to relatively few women, Welter's article deserves a fresh read. I think too often we …