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2 - Women in public

from Part I - Historical and theoretical background

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Dale M. Bauer
Affiliation:
University of Kentucky
Philip Gould
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
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Summary

Introduction: separate spheres

The notion of “the separate spheres” has been used for over a century to endow emerging cultural hierarchies with the obviousness of gender (male/ female) opposition: elite literature v. popular literature; high culture v. mass culture; professional and market culture v. domestic culture; business-place competition v. sentimental equality; public sphere rationality v. domestic feeling. These multiple, seemingly rigid definitions for various complementary and/or oppositional practices have long informed our study of nineteenthcentury women's literature and the historical contexts that shaped its concerns in the United States.

The logic of difference and even opposition supplied by the notion of “separate spheres” has funded a feminist focus on women’s lives, women’s politics and women’s literature since the 1960s. Reacting to historical and literary models that overwhelmingly deemed women’s lives irrelevant to larger historical matters, this newer generation of women academics historicized and theorized a “world of women” that allowed us to appreciate nineteenth-century women’s world, their domestic perspectives, their values, and their social and political subversiveness and opposition. Feminist historians returned to one of the most powerful early descriptions of United States democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, and in particular, his celebration of “The Young [American] Woman as Wife” (1835, 1840).

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2001

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  • Women in public
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.003
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  • Women in public
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.003
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Women in public
  • Edited by Dale M. Bauer, University of Kentucky, Philip Gould, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century American Women's Writing
  • Online publication: 28 May 2006
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521660033.003
Available formats
×