The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

influence for men and women” (3). Separate spheres ideology was the nineteenth-century American thought that relegated women to the home and men to the workplace. Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of Godey’s , strongly believed in the antebellum Cult of True Womanhood and concomitant domesticity discourses, and such cultural, gender-specific, political ideas spread across the country through Godey’s and other domestic periodicals. From a twenty-first century view, relegating women to the domestic sphere seems limiting, but for Victorian American women, it actually gave them power and control in the sphere of their own home. Such influential ideologies spread throughout women’s magazines, and thus domestic periodicals empowered the female gender. In the nineteenth-century, religion reinforced a woman’s place in the domestic sphere, and many periodicals were religious and Protestant in nature. In her article “‘The Christian World Magazine’: Christian Publishing and Women’s Empowerment,” scholar Julie Melnyk emphasizes that despite Christianity’s historic reputation of patriarchy, religious Victorian periodicals used religion to empower women in the home. According to cultural discourses of the day (The Cult of True Womanhood, domesticity, separate spheres ideology, etc.), Americans considered women more virtuous and spiritual than men, and it was their job to raise moral children and protect their husbands and home from the evils of the secular world. Because American culture considered women pure and spiritual, they were able to participate in and take power from the area of religion. The domestic sphere was an area that women could personally control and establish subjectivity in, and religious periodicals supported such beliefs: Emma Jane Worboise, editor of The Christian World Magazine in the 1860s, writes, “I purpose myself to devote a page or two monthly to the consideration of housewifely duties. Surely it is the Christian duty of a Christian woman to order her household decently, comfortably , and as 49