, a book that James Baldwin later christened the ‘cornerstone of American social protest fiction’. It might also be considered theof 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.
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.
But one didn’t need to be a rabid Red-baiter or a nativist mud-slinger in the first decades of the 20th century to resist structural change to a system that was clearly underserving huge swathes of the population. From the first, women’s free-floating reformist, caretaking energy was seen as a threat to even the ‘liberal’ corporate capitalist order, and as such something to be defended against.
If Frederick played mainly on the brusque, no-nonsense language of economic efficiency to convince housewives to exercise virtue through private spending, Rindlaub discovered that what she called ‘heart-tug’ advertising was unmatched in its ability to co-opt white women’s free-floating maternal sentiment and channel it into private purchasing decisions. Women were sentimental creatures, she insisted. Her in-house polls taught her that, and she passed on the tip to her corporate clients.
But in postwar America, appeals to political mobilisation of the Thompson variety fell increasingly out of step with the times. In place of helping to build a foundational ‘home’ for those left out of the blessings of an expanding economy, postwar households would busy themselves, instead, with the pursuit of private domestic comforts.
But in fact, this pandemic-induced retreat to the comforts of home merely amplified a trend that Emily Matchar documented in her. Middle-class white women fed up with the dispiriting side of corporate capitalism – routinised boredom, Big Ag and its terrors, artificiality in all of its guises – were choosing to ‘opt out’ of the system in record numbers. From home-schooling to vegetable gardens to urban chicken coops, women retreated into the splendid isolation and safety of their homes.
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