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  • Domesticating Women: The Gendering of Politics in Great Britain and Anglo-America
  • Toby L. Ditz (bio)
Mary Beth Norton. Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. xxi + 247 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

Separated by Their Sex might best be described as an essay on English and Anglo-American political thought that seeks to pinpoint when it became an axiom that women as such ought to be excluded from direct participation in political life. This is a classic and enduringly important question, and Mary Beth Norton thinks it through with the help of strategically selected texts in print periodicals, supplemented by other print genres and unpublished writing. The pivot came, she argues, in the three or four decades after the Glorious Revolution, when highly influential English political polemicists made several integrally related conceptual innovations—innovations that circulated widely through print media on both sides of the British Atlantic. These included, above all, she argues, a dualist gendering of public and private domains of action and a decisive feminization of private life.

Readers of Mary Beth Norton’s Founding Mothers and Fathers (1996) will be familiar with some of her new book’s major premises. She once again convincingly argues that elite women could participate directly in seventeenth-century politics by virtue of their high rank. They did so precisely because politics rested on a combination of patronage and personal influence and on a “world view that . . . combined rather than separated familial and political matters” (p. 19). But although its first two chapters are devoted to women’s petitions during the English civil war and on Lady Berkeley, the wife of Virginia’s royal governor during the tumult of Bacon’s Rebellion, Separated by Their Sex is not primarily about the seventeenth century, but about the working out of new gender distinctions from the 1690s through the American Revolution. It also places less emphasis on constraining or overarching political ideologies and discourses: Filmer’s patriarchalism and Lockean liberalism barely appear, jettisoned in favor of a systematic examination of the changing meaning of such key terms as “private” and “public” in a variety of sources and idioms. [End Page 365]

I was at first a resisting reader. “Hasn’t enough ink been spilled already,” I thought, “about the private/public distinction and its complications?” But in fairness, much of the wasted ink has concerned our own analytic or interpretive categories. Norton is not revisiting that subject. She establishes at the outset that her definition of public life “encompasses” but is broader than Habermas’ concept of the politically relevant public and that she is especially interested in women as “state actors” (a phrase she borrows from Margaret Hunt, pp. xii–xiii). Having done so, she is free to concentrate on what really interests her: the conceptual grids used by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers to map gender onto the social and political world. On this subject, Norton offers many fresh readings. She is at her best when showing that, until the last decade of the seventeenth century, writers rarely used collective gender categories such as the “‘fair sex’” or the “‘Female pen’” either as self-designations or as disqualifications for political action (p. 108). They preferred to describe women in terms of their social status and roles (mother, daughter, servant, mistress, and so on). Individual women could be castigated for their political actions and influence, as was true of Lady Berkeley and many others, but no matter how vicious the political invective, few suggested that such women should not interfere in politics simply because they were women. Such language first becomes prominent only in the 1690s and then became very widespread in the eighteenth century.

Norton marshals on behalf of her thesis important aspects of broader cultural practices, including the persisting dearth of commentary on politics in women’s correspondence. She also points out that, after the Glorious Revolution, English writers simply stopped addressing serious political pamphlets directly to women as they had done in the past. Her strategic focus on what all specialists agree are among the most influential periodicals of their era is also clever...

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