Goodreads asked Mary Beth Norton:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Mary Beth Norton Separated by their Sex was inspired by a disjunction: in research for my book Liberty's Daughters (which began in approximately 1750) I learned that women were very aware of their gender and saw themselves as inferior to men. But in research for my next book, Founding Mothers & Fathers, I learned that seventeenth-century American women (to c. 1670) had very different conceptions of themselves. What had happened between 1670 & 1750 to change things? I asked myself. Separated by their Sex gives the answer I found, which required work in and about England as well as America.

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