Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World
"As Norton notes, this book is a prequel toLiberty's Daughters. Norton had found that in 1750, men and women alike considered the 'fair sex' inferior and largely irrelevant to the world beyond their households. InSeparated by Their Sex, she searches for the origins of this paradigm and specifically for its signature dichotomy of male/public versus female/private. . . . Norton's contribution is to chart in meticulous detail the political options available primarily to elite women and the subsequent eradication of those options. A little book that deals with big issues in an Atlantic world context,Separated by Their Sexis also an object lesson in the value of digital sources and methods for historians. Norton recognizes the importance of language: using full-text searches in massive collections of digitized materials enabled her to chart rhetorical innovations (and hence cultural trends) with remarkable precision."—Cynthia A. Kierner,Journal of American History"Senior early American women's history scholar Norton, who also understands English sources, is ideally situated to ponder the intellectual worlds of early modern Anglo-Americans. Building on her work inFounding Mothers and Fathers, these essays interrogate the changing ways people understood the relationship of public to private, one of the most persistent issues in women's history. Recommended."—Choice"Norton's book brings a welcome historical specificity with a focus on words and politics. For readers wondering what there is left to say about the public/private split, Norton reminds us that binary concepts have a specific political and cultural history. . . . The public/private splite, Norton argues, had one genealogy, the 'feminine private sphere,' and the idea that politics was an exclusively male domain had different ones, each deserving its own history. . . . It should, in the best way of provocative work, inspire additional comparative studies of women's words. . . . Norton's work provides an essential framework for future investigations."—Social History"Mary Beth Norton is always bold, always challenging, always ambitious. In this stunningly researched new book, Norton reconfigures our thinking about women's status in Britain and America during the long century after the English Civil War by mapping a shift in worldview from hierarchy to gender.Separated by their Sexwill stir interest and debate."—Edith Gelles, Stanford University, author ofAbigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage"Challenging previously held views, Mary Beth Norton shows that the growing exclusion of women from politics and public life at the time of the American Revolution had not always been the case. Through a brilliant analysis of English and American sources, Norton traces the complex changes that produced a more rigidly defined definition of sex roles. This is transatlantic history at its best."—Rosemarie Zagarri, author ofRevolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic"Separated by Their Sexgrapples with a fundamental question in early American women's history and presents an important missing piece to aid our understanding of the creation of a private female sphere antithetical to a male public/political realm."—Clare Lyons, University of Maryland, author ofSex among the Rabble