No abstract

Historians of Britain often call the period between 1780 and 1850 the age of 'separate spheres' or 'domestic ideology' for men and women, and when they do, they are likely to reference Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Working Class, 1780-1850 (1987). This essay takes the 25th anniversary of Family Fortunes as an occasion on which to assess the book and its treatment of the ideology of separate spheres. Careful reading reveals that while Family Fortunes is often remembered as championing an historical focus on the emergence of separate spheres ideology, it is in fact an account of the formation of the English middle class that interprets separate spheres ideology in complex and nuanced ways. The principal contribution of Family Fortunes is its demonstration that notions of gender were central to class as it was constructed and as it was experienced and lived out. Gender was not merely an aspect of social life; rather, gender and class were mutually constitutive.This essay takes the 25th anniversary of Family Fortunes as an occasion to assess the ideology of separate spheres and its treatment in Family Fortunes. It argues that separate spheres ideology, never clearly dominant in British society, was not simplistically narrated in Family Fortunes. The essay concludes that Family Fortunes' most important contribution to historical practice is not its alleged championing of attention to separate spheres ideology, but its insistence and demonstration that gender and class are mutually constitutive. This larger structural point continues to be productive in a variety of historical works.Close attention to the doctrine of separate spheres is not unique to British history, nor was analysis of it introduced into historical discourse by Davidoff and Hall. The concept first appeared in the 1970s in work on the United States. Where in British history, the publication of Family Fortunes sparked the intensive critical interrogation of the notion of separate spheres, in American history, historian Linda Kerber could in 1988 publish an article that reflected on an already-extant body of scholarship on separate spheres. 2 In American scholarship, the separate spheres are seen as having had a restricting but also a unifying function for women: women were confined to the domestic sphere, but they also developed a rich and separate women's culture. Thus separate spheres created community for women. 3 This emphasis on a nurturing women's culture is largely absent in the British historiography. The notion of separate spheres is also found in works on continental European history, where its 18th-century origins are often referred to in terms of the Enlightenment and the works of Rousseau, which are rarely invoked in the British context. Examination of the doctrine of separate spheres is also found in works on colonial and postcolonial societies, where it is usually marshaled to demonstrate that western imperial powers imposed their ideology of separate spheres on indigenous cultures, wi...

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract