AbstractAn ideal domesticity of the mid‐19th century advocated a role for white women in civilizing and defending the American family home from cultural incursions. Black (and other non‐White, non‐Anglo‐Saxon Protestant) women, omitted from dominant representations of domesticity, provided their own literary interventions to appropriate and adapt the ideology. Short scenes of mundane domestic labor show authors reworking the relationship of domesticity to race and class. Textile work such as sewing (depicted in the works of Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, Fanny Fern, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) becomes the focal point for social change, enabling an appropriation of domesticity by individuals usually excluded. Current material culture studies investigate the interaction of human subjects and material objects in specific contexts that enact cultural meaning. Applying these studies to fictional and non‐fictional narratives reveals how authors used their lived experiences with objects to query the racial and ethnic foundations of domestic womanhood in varied narrative contexts.
