it, not only in the private arena but in the public one as well.
The idea that the home is the natural sphere of women is an ancient one, and one that other civilizations, with traditions of the near-complete seclusion of women, have taken much further than has Western civilization. In the pre-industrial age, however, "the home" encompassed much broader range of activities than it does today. The pre-industrial economy was very largely a household economy, and the home was the center of economic life. It is worth remembering that the very term economics originally meant something like what is now called "home economics. Farm households were largely self-sufficient. Even in the towns, the men did not leave home to "go to work," for the most part, because the shop or workshop adjoined the living quarters. Apprentices and other workmen, like house servants, were also likely to be in effect part of the household. Thus, in colonial America,
There were sharp rhetorical distinctions between that narrowly defined "public," from which women were
excluded, and the privacy of familiar domesticity.
The realities of seventeenth-century life, however,
allocated to the family many activities and
responsibilities--such as education, business
activities, and health and welfare--that we now
associated with public life and institutions. As a
result, political and religious activities remained
highly personalized, more like kinship than the
impersonal relationships associated with twentieth-
In these conditions, women, in spite of the social constraints upon them, participated broadly in economic life. The shopkeeper's or merchant's wife was likely to be vastly more knowledgeable about and involved in her husband's trade than the housewife of the 1950s; if he were called away, she no doubt took his place at the counter.
In the age of monarchy and aristocracy, even political life was conducted la...