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

This book is characteristic of Norton's many works—insightful, rich, bold, and lucid. It is the second (though written last) of a trilogy now completed, tracking ideals of femininity and gender from the early colonial period—Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996))—to the Revolutionary era—Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980). This trilogy represents an extraordinary lifetime's work for a prolific, brilliant, and path-breaking historian; it will doubtless remain on reading lists for decades to come.

In Separated by Their Sex, Norton tracks the rise of the idea of "separate spheres" in which women were excluded from the public realm and relegated to the private one. Evidently, the turning point was the early eighteenth century, when English print culture (and its male authors) popularized this bifurcation. Although much recent scholarship has spent time demolishing the walls between private and public, Norton instead focuses on making the separation historically contingent, trying to pinpoint precisely when and how the language of politics excluding women (even elite ones) came to dominate.

To answer the question, Norton consulted a wide array of printed and manuscript sources on both sides of the Atlantic. She also delved into literary works, including notable periodicals like The Athenian Mercury and The Spectator, making her study valuable for literary scholars as well as historians. This book is the most thoroughly and self-consciously centered on the Atlantic of any of her works (notwithstanding the London-based research for her early work about Loyalists). The chapters alternate colonial situations and sources with English ones, moving through time from the pre-watershed seventeenth century into the post-watershed mid-eighteenth century, with interludes that focus on particular women, assessing the "take up" of the new gender regime. This structure generally works well. Indeed, many of the interludes, such as those about Mistress Alice Tilly and Sarah Kemble Knight, are captivating in themselves.

Chapter 1 focuses on Lady Frances Berkeley's role in Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia during the 1670s. Norton contends that, as wife of the governor and cousin of Nathaniel Bacon, she was "an important state actor" (10). Norton uses Lady Frances' interventions in the rebellion to depict a seventeenth-century world in which rank and status still trumped gender. Although many contemporaries criticized the nature of Lady Frances' involvement, no one appeared to question whether she should or could involve herself in state politics.

Chapter 2 moves across the Atlantic to women's novel collective petitioning during the English Civil War. Like Lady Frances, these women provoked criticism but, Norton argues, more because of the substance of their petitions, or their nonelite rank, than for their political action per se. This chapter offers ingenuous and persuasive close readings of women's petitions and satires about them.

The next two chapters fix on that moment in the eighteenth century when, according to Norton, gender began to trump rank. Exploring the print culture of England at the time—especially John Dunton's The Athenian Mercury (and its advice letters to readers) and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator and The Tatler—she contends that "John Dunton thus in 1702 outlined what became the modern Western world's division of labor between men and women, developing both the public/private split in its modern form and laying out the first definition of separate spheres" [italics in original] (103). She argues persuasively for the prevalence of works like The Spectator in the colonies. An interlude on the politically well-connected Lady Chatham, Hester Grenville Pitt, and her correspondents implies that women, taking the lessons of such authors to heart, became increasingly apologetic for even mentioning politics in personal letters.

The final section investigates how both men and women came to emphasize the private sphere as female. This section includes discussions...