The notion of the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ has informed much of women’s history over the past three decades. One of the important underlying characteristics of the separate-spheres model is that it provided an explanatory framework to elaborate the decline in women’s opportunities from a golden age of independence and rough and ready equality with men to a cloistered private, domesticated existence that reached its peak (or trough) in the middle of the nineteenth century. It was propped up by the belief that the development of industrial and commercial society created a separation of home and work, thus relegating women to the home and reducing their opportunities. The proportion of working women and the range of their activities and the physical and psychological spaces they occupied are clear confirmation that they were not sequestered or protected in a private place. Neither did political women stay at home, though part of the anxiety about their political activities was the result of their very visible presence in the streets. Further research, which has concentrated on individuals and groups outside of the bourgeois model, has also provided important critiques of the model and the social theories that underpinned them. The resilience of the concept, despite vigorous debates, as Lynn Abrams argues, presents challenges ‘for the historian of women if she wishes to privilege this sphere as a site of female consciousness and power’ (p.17). All of the authors engage with this paradigm at some level, contextualising it within their own analysis and often pointing out its porosity. Indeed, the permeability of the separate spheres has made it possible for historians to look at the ways women claimed particular spaces, whether it was the home, as Abrams suggests, or the barnyard and kitchen as a place of recognised female control on the peasant farm, or a political space and to examine the ways they negotiated ‘male’ spaces such as the eighteenth-century corporate town or political parties.
World History
