Stepping Out: Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres

Stepping Out:

Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres

In the novel The House on Mango Street, child narrator Esperanza says of her great-grandmother, "She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow." ¹ Here Esperanza invokes an iconic image of womanhood, one that may seem increasingly retrograde but that continues to maintain a kind of pull over our imaginations: the woman trapped in the home. Esperanza's great-grandmother peers sadly out the window, as do many female literary characters. And yet over the last two decades a growing number of feminist scholars have challenged the iconic status of the woman at home. They have offered documentation of women's work outside the home and have questioned the cultural baggage that has come to be associated with domesticity. In a broader sense, scholars have challenged the interpretive power of "separate spheres" ideology and have destabilized, as well, the private/public dichotomy that for many years was the overarching descriptor for men's and women's lives in the nineteenth century and beyond. Such books as Mary Ryan's Women in Public (1990), Carla Peterson's "Doers of the Word" (1995), and Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher's No More Separate Spheres! (2002) have offered complex readings of women's lives, suggesting that women were not always in the home, that when they were the home was not always an entrapping space in which they "sat [their] sadness on an elbow," and that intersections of race, class, gender, nationality, and other identity categories affected women's experiences as much as, if not more than, separate spheres ideology. As Davidson explains, "[F]or all the utopic appeal of loving female worlds, the binaric vision of nineteenth-century American history is ultimately unsatisfactory because it is simply too crude an instrument—too rigid and totalizing—for understanding the different, complicated ways that nineteenth-century American society or literary production functioned." ²

The four volumes under review participate in this lively scholarly conversation. While much of the research that challenges the notion of women in private and men in public has emerged from studies of nineteenth-century American womanhood, these volumes extend their insights into other times and other cultural settings. Considering women's experiences globally as well as women's experiences in the twentieth century and beyond, these volumes contend that the separate spheres model is an inadequate conceptual tool, and they offer complex readings of women's lives that document the intermingling of the private and public and articulate new models for gendered subjectivity. To greater and lesser degrees, these authors also develop theoretical approaches that are broadly based and poststructuralist, questioning not only separate spheres but the whole host of prescriptive binaries often invoked in scholarly studies of women's history. As Joan W. Scott and Debra Keates note in the preface to Going Public, "The categories of public and private are fundamental not only to Western liberal democracy (and thus to feminism's critique of it) but also to global human rights movements in the twentieth and...