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

It is safe to say that when Mary Beth Norton published her path-breaking 1980 book Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Cornell University Press), she had no idea that she had written the first (and chronologically last) part of a trilogy that would examine gender constructs throughout early America. The second book in that trilogy, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (Vintage, 1996), reached back to the earliest days of colonization, bringing to life a Filmerian world that was both authoritarian and organic. Separated by Their Sex not only bridges the gap between these two monumental studies (it is a prequel to Liberty’s Daughters and a sequel to Founding Mothers and Fathers) but expands Norton’s geographical focus, reminding readers that the early British colonists lived in a truly Anglo-American Atlantic world.

In Separated by Their Sex, Norton is primarily concerned with tracing the historical origins of the notion of “separate spheres,” a construct that rhetorically relegated white women to the private domain, while giving men authority in the public realm. Historians know, of course—and Norton does not argue with them—that no such division existed in the real world. Nevertheless, at some point (and historians differ about when and why it happened) the language of separate spheres began to dominate the rhetoric, if not the reality, of gender relations. Norton admits that she does not know why the language of separate spheres appeared, but she makes a solid case for pointing to the early eighteenth century as the time when such language began to characterize descriptions of women’s place, first in England and then in the colonies.

In the beginning, says Norton, status trumped gender. In England, Queen Elizabeth could expect and receive deference from subjects of both sexes. In the colonies, aristocratic women, such as Lady Frances Berkeley, the wife of Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley, could “interfere” in public, political matters without fear of condemnation. While her detractors may have criticized Lady Frances, “she was never said to have stepped outside the boundaries of the ‘private sphere’” (34). Lower-class women, on the other hand, found that for them politics was off limits. Thus, when ordinary English women petitioned Parliament during the English Civil War, they were mocked and reviled in truly misogynistic style. Beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, notions of women’s nature and women’s place gradually began to change. But it was not until the burgeoning of print culture that, beginning in England and quickly moving across the Atlantic, notions of women as necessarily belonging in the domestic realm started to take hold in earnest. Women were categorized as private; they were excluded from the public and especially from the political arenas. Men became identified with the economic and political realms, and were removed—rhetorically if not in fact—from control over the home. At the same time, the term “sphere” became associated not with status or rank but with normative “masculine” or “feminine” roles, and all women (not just the lower and middling sort) were confined—“naturally”—to the domestic sphere. The Lockean division between family and state had reached its logical conclusion.

The change first began to appear tentatively in England with John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury. Struggling with the implications of Queen Anne’s ascendancy to the throne, Dunton ultimately declared that a “husband’s ‘Business is without-doors’ while a wife’s was ‘properly within-doors.’” Not only should women be excluded from public affairs, said Dunton, but “men should not in any sense be viewed as household governors” (102). But it was Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, in the Tatler and the Spectator, who most firmly and completely assigned men and women to separate realms. Both men presumed “two gender-differentiated sets of readers with diverse interests...