"Old Husbands' Tales": Offentlighet och privat i feministisk historia

Abstract

Leonore Davidoff addresses the association of masculine and feminine identities with the institutional development of separate spheres, while appreciating that the terms "public" and "private" simultaneously express a constantly shifting social and psychic world. Focusing broadly on nineteenthcentury England, she proposes that gendered notions of public and private also interact with the institutions of private property and the märket, as well as with notions of rational individualism. Davidoff charts the gendered creation of various public domains that had rational man at its centre and embodied woman at the periphery. Observing that the masculine domination of the public was never unproblematic, she calls attention to nineteenth-century British womens participation in the semi-public realm of "the social" as charity workers or volunteers, and their role as feminist political activists.