Ritual Chores: Catharine Beecher’s Domesticity

Abstract

Abstract What is a ritual chore? By analyzing the nineteenth-century American theorist of domesticity Catharine Beecher, this article argues that there is a form of gendered ritual that is submissive and unproductive. Unlike scholars such as Saba Mahmood and R. Marie Griffith who have argued for acknowledging the practical cultivation of virtue in conservative religious women’s piety, Beecher provides a model of gendered ritual that produced a flurry of activity rather than a self. Ritual chores, Beecher teaches us, do not result in self-mastery. The nineteenth-century middle-class Christian woman tended to her home by initiating the work of her servants; thus, her theory of domesticity was also a theory of ritual surrogacy, or the enactment of ritual at the behest of another. I argue that the dissatisfaction of the white-collar middle-manager and the nineteenth century northeastern housewife have much in common: both roles make the worker feel like their labor might in fact be pointless.