Separate Spheres is a concept within Women's History and Gender History that describes the split dominions of the home and public spheres along gender lines, primarily in 19th Century Britain, although the ideology was present at work in the Americas as well. The notion of separate spheres dictated that men, based primarily on their biological makeup (as well as the will of God) deserved power in the public sphere, that of the economy, commerce, politics, etc. whereas women, for similar reasons, were confined to the private sphere—domestic life and all that implied, such as child-rearing, housekeeping, and religious education.[1]
It was originally thought of by most men and women to be natural and even affirming for women, evidenced by the observations of French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville in his Democracy in the Americas; there is an entire chapter devoted to the roles of American women, in which he says, "As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of the [American] people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women."[2]
Feminists, Traditionalists, academics and critics take a wide variety of standpoints on the role of women. Many feminists argue that marriage as an institution bolsters capitalism while confining and oppressing women. The distribution of labor based on gender has historically gravely impaired the aspirations of women, because they were legally unable to participate in the public sphere.
The notion of separate spheres managed to prevail in the dominant mainstream consciousness as well-founded, or at the very worst harmless, until the mid-twentieth century when gender historians and feminist theorists began to gain more and more exposure in the world of academia, and subsequently in the minds of the general public. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique 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. Barbara Welter drew on Friedan and continued in this vein in her essay The Cult of True Womanhood by showing that the values attributed to a woman who operated "well" in the feminine sphere (piety, purity, submission, domesticity) were in no way "feminine" -- only a means to keep women under that subjugating hegemony.[3]
Dr Cathy Ross suggested, in her paper Separate Spheres or Shared Dominions that when the system was applied to individual cases, the theory of Separate Spheres proved to be inaccurate.[4]