The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the cultural construction of the ideal domestic woman in British society in a wide range of discursive practices such as conduct books, novels, magazines, sermons and medical tracts, etc. More specifically, numerous female-authored domestic novels proliferated the doctrine of domestic womanhood by creating heroines who embodied the modest, chaste, and self-sacrificing gender ideal. Many critics have questioned why women writers actively participated in the construction of the sexless and selfless images of women that seemed to serve only the dominant patriarchal power, while others have viewed these women writers as mindless conspirators of patriarchal ideology. In this essay, however, I examine the complex ideological implications surrounding this gender ideal and argue that these women writers were not so much passive bearers of patriarchal ideology but they were active agents, who acted according to their own gendered interest by simultaneously promoting and subverting the image of the ideal domestic woman. The domestic womanhood of the Romantic era constituted a location in which the interests of the British nation, the middle class, and patriarchy, intersected. On one hand, the morally enhanced image of domestic women functioned as symbolic capital in consolidating and naturalizing the middle-class hegemony, British internal colonialism, and British overseas expansion. On the other hand, domestic femininity was also a reflection of male anxiety about the increasingly unstable gender boundary in a rapidly changing society in which middle and upper-class women widely participated in cultural and political activities outside the home. Because the ideal domestic woman reflected disparate interests, the attitude of women writers toward this gender ideal was extremely ambivalent. As members and beneficiaries of an expanding nation and a rising class, they endorsed and promoted this gender ideal; however, as secondary citizens in a male-dominated society, they tried to subvert the separate spheres ideology that prescribed domesticity as women`s only sphere. Focusing on woman-authored domestic novels of the Romantic period, this essay analyzes the ways in which these women writers simultaneously construct and deconstruct the ideology of the domestic woman.