SOURCE: "The Tears and Trials of Domesticity: Women's Fiction in the 1850s," in The Empire of the Mother: American Writing about Domesticity, 1830-1860, The Institute for Research in History and The Haworth Press, 1982, pp. 115-41.

In the following excerpt, Ryan contends that the cult of domesticity, with its emphasis on mothers as the protectors of morality, linked the sentimental novel to the abolitionist movement.

Most writers of the 1850s recorded only the routine discomforts of love and marriage. T.S. Arthur wrote in Home Lights and Shadows, "Oh, how dark the shadows at times, and how faint the sunshine" in the ordinary urban home.¹ In Married Not Mated Alice Carey wrote of the endurable but imperfect matches East and West. Grace Greenwood's light offering, Greenwood Leaves, recorded the bitter-sweet trials of domestic women:

It is one of my beliefs that every tolerably pretty maiden (present company excepted) who...