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Motherhood, as idea, myth, institution, experience was always a cultural variable. It changed depending on time, place, ethnic group and class. Because people still lived within a Victorian ideology, there was a tendency to assume that motherhood was a fixed concept, that what we assumed an expected had always been assumed and expected. In fact, the ideology of femininity and domesticity that Stowe took for granted was a relatively new invention—the result of a shift in white Western thinking from parenting to mothering as the dominant ideal around the end of eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth—century. This concept motherhood—feminized parenthood, served to rationalize women’s remaining the home at a time when changes in the economy were for the first time raising the possibility of economic self-sufficiency for large numbers of women. This is, the promotion of motherhood as a full-time occupation for women conveniently emerged at just the time that a fundamental change in the traditional pattern of female dependence might have occurred. On the other hand, it is important to remember that for most people work outside the home during the nineteenth century offered very low pay, long hours, no financial security, and any number of physical dangers. Being assigned to the domestic realm may very well have liked not much different from work in the commercial sector. So, it was not a simple matter of the new ideology being either good or bad for women. In fact, it was both historically.
Stowe heartily embraced the Victorian idealization of motherhood and channeled it into an argument for widespread social change. Like her famous sister Catharine Beecher, Stowe concurred in the culture’s insistence on the importance, even sacredness, of maternal values, and she argued from that premise that, rather than segregate maternal etics into some private domestic realm, motherhood—the morality of women—should be made the ethical and structural model for all of American life. Stowe’s idealism encouraged her—and generations after her—to embrace an ideology that emphasizes difference rather than equality between the sexes. To Stowe, only morality of women, or to be more specific, only through motherly love can we redeem the fallen world. Much of the impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is predicated on the successful inculcation of this domestic ideology.