Spheres, Sites, Subjectivity, History: Reframing Antebellum American Society

Mary Kelley's Learning to Stand and Speak is landmark in both the debate over the gendered "doctrine of separate spheres" and our understanding of civil space in antebellum America. Rather than situating women and men in "separate spheres, public and private," she offers a framework of "multiple sites in civil society." Drawn from critical theory, "discursive sites" or "sites of cultural production," describe circles of authors and readers sharing a common framework of language, understanding, and problematic. There is a multiplicity of these sites - or perhaps "publics"—in a modern culture, and Kelley situates them in "civil society," which she construes broadly as the domain protected by law, but excluding partisan and deliberative politics. The discursive sites that make up the sociology of civil society have both public and private dimensions, cutting across "separate spheres," and rendering them meaningless. Kelley and contributor Philip Gould see powerful continuities in the experience of women between the Revolution and the Civil War, and beyond. The contributions of Jeanne Boydston and Rosemarie Zagarri bring history into play in ways that complicate our abandonment of the doctrine of separate spheres, bringing into focus issues of class and generational experience. Boydston argues that the protection of law in antebellum America had sharp contours and boundaries, and thus "civil society" had a distinctly more limited, class-defined, reach than Kelley would suggest. Zagarri points to a profound generational divide in the 1820s, as American women responded to a "revolutionary backlash" limiting their place in public.