Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World

by Mary Beth Norton

In Separated by Their Sex , Mary Beth Norton offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon’s Rebellion by the actions of―and reactions to―Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia’s governor. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the Civil War of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Even so, as late as 1690, Anglo-American women’s political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged. Norton traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women’s participation in public affairs to the age’s cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury , a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women’s links to husband, family, and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word "private" to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the immensely influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that women’s participation in politics―even in political dialogues―was absurd. They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such "private" activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, Norton concludes, a newly gendered public-private division was firmly in place.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2011

Reviews

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Norton wrote this as a "Prequel" to Founding Mothers and Fathers and as well as to finally get to the gender analysis she intended to do for In the Devil's Snare , before she got sidetracked by Wabanakis (see pg.183, FN. 6). I'm not particularly well-versed in gender history/studies, so while I found this work to be revelatory, I suspect that serious students of gender may not find this as new and shiny as I do. The stated purpose of the work is to study historical uses of the terms public and private spheres through the lens of gender, which she notes that few historians have done. (pg. XIV) The question driving her research is "how did the private sphere go from being an ungendered term in the 17th century to becoming a women's domain by the mid-18th century? (pg. XV)

One critique I have upfront is that Norton writes that she intends to explain how and when gendered transformations of the public and private spheres occurred, but not why. (pg. 7). She explains her decision by noting that "the why" would be a difficult thing to determine as there were several social shifts that occurred around 1700, which she sees as a major turning point in establishing spheres. I get that this may be a complicated and complex subject to explain, but I would have greatly appreciated if she had taken a stab at it since she is one of the reigning foremost experts on colonial women - her viewpoint would certainly be welcome and since the text is under 200 pages, she had the space to do it without burdening her reader.

That said, the tale she tells is fascinating and counters the traditional timeframe for the development of the "cult of domesticity' as a 19th c. development. It also challenges the notion that in the western world women have never had a political role until more recent times. Her main points are as follows:

1. That in 17th century society, status was valued above gender. The example she gives is of the political involvements of Lady Frances Berkley around Bacon's Rebellion, wife of Sir William Berkley - Governor of Virginia. As the second highest person of rank in the colony (second only to her husband) no one questioned her involvement in the colony's politics, or that she represented her husband during his illness, including as a colonial emissary to England. Even when she botched the affairs of state (which she seemed to be particularly good at), no one blamed her errors on her femininity and her right to be involved in politics was unquestioned because of her rank and status. Participation by women of lesser rank would not have been tolerated, however, status was key. Ultimately, however, rank was superseded by gender.

2. In England, and consequently abroad in her colonies, women found their (gender) roles and power within society redefined in the wake of the Glorious Revolution (1688-89). This was the beginning of the era when "Public"(which Norton defines as "political and government affairs" pg.3) became masculine. These ideas of roles appropriate to gender spread through the growing print and literate culture. Because most colonists got their news from newspapers and books printed in England, it didn't take long for attitudes to alter at home and abroad. Through this process, men's primary identity shifted out of the house and into the public and women's identities became/remained at home and with family. By 1724, the concept of separate spheres had passed into being utilized in language and print. That the women's sphere (home) was a lower status position emerged over time. What ultimately changed this view of the spheres stemmed from the Glorious Revolution and an influx of Lockian philosophy which reconstructed gender. Norton writes:

"Unlike Filmer and his allies, Locke and other Whigs distinguished between the power of fathers and the power of rulers arguing that the polity originated in agreement among men in a theoretical state of nature rather than in the historical authority of female patriarchs. Such a construct meant that women - seen by Locke solely as wives dependent on husbands for any link to political power - could no longer rely on the family analogy to claim authority outside the household context, although within it they had important functions. That division between family and state, with women confined theoretically to the former, served as the foundation for the cultural division that by the mid-eighteenth century manifested itself in the language of the feminine private and the masculine public . [italics = author's original emphasis, bold = my own] (pg. 7-8)

In short, Locke and the Whigs envisioned a government run not by gender generic beings, but by men; that it was a male institution. (pg. 75) To achieve this and break from the past precedents of female queens, females, even and especially aristocrats, had to be distinguished from the men of their own rank and sullied as inappropriate leaders. (pg. 60) The problem with a female monarch and wife, was not that she ruled the country but this meant she ruled the family, which was understood to be the right of men. (pg. 101) Capitalism and Enlightenment ideas, Norton notes, may also have contributed to the gendering of spheres. (pg.8) Their methods worked, and by the 1730s few women claimed any right to rule or to any public role. (pg. 126) However, this did not mean that women, especially aristocratic women, halted their political involvement, just public issues. (pg. 110)

3. So how was this restructuring accomplished? Norton focuses a great deal of attention on how these gender ideas spread, and in her mind the key lay in the growing population of literate people, and in consequence, the growing print culture. Because America had few printing presses prior to the mid 18th century, the vast majority of publications read by the colonists came from England. The most common being The Spectator and The Tattler . Earlier work by John Dunton was also influential, and he wrestled with the position of women in his publications and he was apparently the first to link women with private spheres in a new way. ( pg. 102, but see chapter 3) Through Dunton's and other publications, by the 1730s, colonists and Englishmen were using nearly identical language to describe gender and their appropriate roles. (pg. 108) Overtime, it became stressed that the women's role in the private sphere was also a moral one; that the best use of their time and position was to guard and reform the morals of men. (pg. 134) Norton writes that: "By the late 1740s, therefore, the transition to a novel way of thinking about the relationship of the male/female and public/private had been completed on both sides of the Atlantic. Images eventually associated with the 19th-century cult of domesticity–the household as a quiet haven from a busy world, the wife as the tireless manager caring for her husband's needs and wants– had entered the Anglo-American lexicon." (pg. 153)

Thus women, toned down their discussion of politics and professed ignorance and boredom and tedium with that realm. (pg. 135) However, we know this to be somewhat of a false front due to the numbers of women who wrote into ask anonymous questions to the Athenian Mercury, a newspaper initially intended for men, but was clearly read by great numbers of women too.



Teachers/Instructors may find the short stories she includes between the chapters as useful for classroom purposes and as a way to have a discussion on these topics without having to assign the whole book.

[Beth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice breakdown of the chronology of the development of separate spheres ideology...wish this had been published when I sat for my comprehensive exams!