Traditionally the house has been seen as a private/fe-male world and the outside world as a public/male world. This binary opposition has influenced many studies of past households, classifying private life as that pertaining to women, children, and slaves, and the household as being made up of elements that serve the master in his negotiations with the world outside the household. However, such assumptions are, again, part of the cultural baggage of modern scholars. The association of women with private and men with public are aspects for upper - and middle-class European societies which have become reified in historical documentation. Even in ancient Rome, the Vestal Virgins, a community of aristocratic women, resided in the center of the most central domain of Roman public life - the Roman forum - and, far from being a secluded religious sect, played an active role in Roman sociopolitical life.
Cross-cultural studies show that perceptions of a domestic/female:public/male dichotomy as a universal concept have an unwarranted normalizing effect on our understanding of past household behavior. Indeed, even in nineteenth-century urban contexts the instigation of public and cooperative housekeeping challenges the traditional definition of households as private and extends women’s ‘private’ roles to the ‘public’ community. From the 1870s, in cities like Paris, London, Moscow, Boston, and New York, middle-and upper-class commercial cooperative apartment hotels; noncommercial cooperative homes for single working women; and the activities of domestic reformers saw household tasks socialized into cooperative institutions. Thus, studies of household archaeology must tread cautiously when attempting to treat excavated spaces as dichotomized public or private space and to associate them, accordingly, with specifically male or female activities.
World History
