Separate spheres
The idea that women should inhabit a separate domestic sphere has appeared in Western thought for centuries, extending back to the ancient Greeks.
Theorists such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx have argued that following the rise of capitalism, the home lost its control of the means of production and consequently became a private, separate sphere.
As a result, Engels contended, women were excluded from participating directly in the production process and relegated to the subordinate domestic sphere.
Another major commentator on the modern idea of "separate spheres" was the French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville.
[16]Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) asserted that women were being forced to rely on their husbands and children as the sole sources of their identity by an historically constructed oppressive paradigm, not by any "intrinsic" predisposition.
Drawing on Friedan, historian Barbara Welter identified a "Cult of True Womanhood", an ideal of femininity prevalent among the upper and middle classes in the 19th century.
This model mainly focuses on the generational subordination of women in relation to men throughout history and across different cultures, defining the domestic and public spheres in very black and white terms.
Woman, Culture, and Society[19] co-editor Louis Lamphere breaks down Rosaldo's model and discusses the spheres in different terms.
[19] According to Cary Franklin, the women’s rights movements in the mid-1960s proposed that to achieve true equality between the sexes, it would be necessary for laws to be put in place to move past the simple separate spheres model and address the “interspherical impacts”.
[20] Deborah Rotman, an anthropologist at Notre Dame, analyzed this concept of separate spheres among the people of Deerfield, Massachusetts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
As equal rights became part of the ideological framework in Deerfield, women found themselves voting in school boards, working on municipal water projects and fundraising as men had done before them.
Despite the traditional understanding of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of completely separate public and private spheres, the Deerfield community challenged these "dichotomies of domesticity" and paved the way for equal rights for men and women.
[23] The idea of biological determinism was popular during the Age of Enlightenment and among such thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau who argued that women were inherently different from men and should devote themselves to reproduction and domesticity.
To please men, to be useful to them, to win their love and respect, to raise them as children, to care for them as adults, correct and console them, make their lives sweet and pleasant; these are women's duties in all ages and these are what they should be taught from childhood.
[25] Despite these new insights and social and economic changes such as women's entry into the labor force, the separate spheres ideology did not disappear.
[2] Strong support for the separation of spheres came from antisuffragists who relied on the notion of inherent sexual differences to argue that women were unfit for political participation.
[34] The rise of teaching as a woman's profession was also closely linked to the ideology of separate spheres, as women came to be regarded as uniquely skilled at classroom management.
