Mary Beth Norton

Separated by Their Sex (eBook, ePUB)

Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

In Separated by Their Sex, Mary Beth Norton offers a bold genealogy that shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the eighteenth century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon's Rebellion by the actions of-and reactions to-Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia's governor. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the Civil War of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Even so, as late as 1690 Anglo-American women's political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged.

Norton traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs to the age's cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury, a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women's links to husband, family, and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word "private" to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the immensely influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that women's participation in politics-even in political dialogues-was absurd. They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such "private" activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, Norton concludes, a newly gendered public-private division was firmly in place.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Cornell University Press
• Seitenzahl: 272
• Erscheinungstermin: 16. Mai 2011
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780801461378
• Artikelnr.: 49446616

Autorenporträt

Mary Beth Norton is Mary Donlon Alger Professor of History at Cornell University. She is the author of many books, including Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800, also from Cornell; In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692; and Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society.

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction1. Lady Frances Berkeley and Virginia Politics
1675-1678 Mistress Alice Tilly and Her Supporters
1649-16502. English Women in the Public Realm
1642-1653Mistress Elinor James and Her Broadsides
1681-1714 3. John Dunton and the Invention of the Feminine PrivateMistress Sarah Kemble Knight and Her Journal
17044. Women and Politics
Eighteenth Century-StyleLady Chatham and Her Correspondents
1740s-1760s5. Consolidating the Feminine PrivateConclusion: Defining "Women"Notes Index