Barbara Welter, a longtime professor at Hunter College whose 1966 article “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820 – 1860” influenced generations of feminist scholars, died December 5, 2022. Her age was unavailable.
Widely credited with launching the field of Women’s Studies, Welter was an intellectual historian who plumbed sources from religious tracts to popular cartoons in order to illuminate American society and its discontents.
She wrote on such topics as women in American Protestantism, Eleanor Roosevelt as a feminist, women’s rights, the YWCA and women in sports with an eye toward exposing the sentimental 19th century attitudes that kept females shackled to hearth and home a century later. The “cult of domesticity” — echoes of which reverberate even today, for example, in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson — posited that women had weak minds and bodies and were best for cultivating family life through inner virtues such as piety, purity, and submission.
Welter was the model of an engaged historian whose work has had a lasting impact on this country. Her ideas had a real power at Hunter — historically, a women’s college — and she profoundly influenced her colleagues and students. Faculty said that she is sorely missed as America once again moves to constrain women’s rights.
A native of White Fish Bay, Wisc., who earned her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1960, Welter headed Hunter’s History Department for more than a decade from the early 1990s to 2009, also holding an appointment for many years at the CUNY Graduate Center. She was a staunch advocate of the importance of history in higher education as well as a “singular personality whose wit and holiday parties were legendary,” according to her colleague Donna Haverty-Stacke.
Welter is survived by a son, John MacGregor Blewer, and maintained homes in New York City and Essex, Conn.
