Resistance as the Byproduct of Separate Spheres :: Essays Papers

Resistance as the Byproduct of Separate Spheres The history of women in the United States is primarily a study of gender, the social construction of sexual difference, through time. The nineteenth century stands out as the period when the code of separate gender spheres emerged and yet, already, began to come into question. Social forces of economic and religious change sculpted gender into a dichotomy differentiated along roughly the same lines as (what we can now consider problematic) divisions between the private/public, emotional/rational, and consuming/producing. Men occupied the privileged side of each binary, relegating women, as a sex, to a gender built of a series of traits defined in opposition to masculine privilege. During this same century, the ideology of separate spheres was increasingly challenged at many levels by critiques and movements for equal rights, substantive justice, and particular ‘women’s issues’. Note first, that as gender is an issue of social construction, this construct can only be shared by particular groups who share social constructs and even then gender is understood in certain limited ways. To accommodate for this and avoid footnoting what may well be entirely distinct histories, I will only discuss the gender through time of Northern white women. For this constructed gender, the changes that brought the code of separate spheres, by changing the relationships of the domestic sphere, also brought the most fundamental challenges to the code, much more so than equal rights in the public sphere could or would accomplish. In order to determine what a fundamental challenge to the code of separate spheres would sound like, it is necessary to determine the nature of the code’s existence. Obviously, this code of spheres did not exist somewhere crawling about a forest floor, rather it was an ideological tenet of a particular society. This does not mean, however, that it was then understood as simply a belief of one group of people in one time and place. Instead it was seen as natural and permanent. As Justice Bradwell explained in a late nineteenth century case, â€Å"the civil law, as well as nature herself, has always recognized a wide difference in the respective spheres and destinies of man and woman† (Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. (16 Wallace) 141 (1872)). Outside of the courtroom, Lydia Sigourney echoed this sentiment in a book targeted for women, exhorting them: â€Å"[c]onsider the sphere in which thou art placed, as the one in which God willeth thee to be† (Sigourney 109) .