“Every woman-cook,” cried little Red Father Lenin in the first flush of revolution, “can rule the state.” But instead the state soon ruled the women, liberating them from the “old household slavery” ...

The 1850s and 1860s in America saw the rise of the “sentimental domestic idea.” Women were held up as examples of purity, piety, and submissiveness. In the American antebellum period, precise and ...