women in public and private in the colonial atlantic world
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Norton, Mary Beth
- Publish Year
- 2011
- Shelfmark
- WER 1C 2011 - B
- Thesaurus
- privé openbaar debat, politieke participatie, huishoudelijke arbeid, kolonialisme, Verenigde Staten, Verenigd Koninkrijk, 17e eeuw, 18e eeuw
- Description
- Norton traces the 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. The influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that women’s participation in politics 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