reading

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 ultra of 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 Post recently 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.