Fabiana Mayer | Samuli Karala | Gloria Finland October 2011 | Extreme Beauty

Michelle Cameron’s styling of ‘Extreme Beauty’, a romantic, Victorian, ladylike editorial starring Fabiana Mayer and lensed by Samuli Karala prompts us to take a look at the British and American ‘Cult of Domesticity’, a plan developed to insure that women lived their lives with perfect virtue.

This is another of our new women’s history lessons, that I am prompted to write as Americam women face the prospect of returning to the Dark Ages, far behind the women of Finland in the quality of our lives — which we are already today. (Note: I will clarify what I mean by quality of life for women in the coming weeks.)

The Victorian Cult of Domesticity in America

In America, the good Christian women who embraced and promoted the Cult of Domesticity were educated and living in the Northeast. They are the very women Phyllis Schlafly loves to hate today, calling us educated Eastern liberals living in glass bubbles and working against women’s interests — a thinking, female, anti-home and family mafia.

Let me not digress. Our focus today is the soulful and spiritual beauty of Victorian women.

According to Barbara Welter, author of the influential essay on this topic, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860” (American Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2, Part i (Summer 1966), pp. 151–174), True Women were to hold the four cardinal virtues:

1. Piety – believed to be more religious and spiritual than men
2. Purity – pure in heart, mind, and body
3. Submission – held in “perpetual childhood” where men dictated all actions and decisions
4. Domesticity – a division between work and home, encouraged by the Industrial Revolution; men went out in the world to earn a living, home became the woman’s domain where a wife created a “haven in a heartless world” for her husband and children.