Public and Private Rule: The Wife and the Citizen

Abstract

History, like most disciplines, has privileged the male experience of the world. This phenomenon is familiar to bookstore browsers who find the U.S. history section arranged chronologically by war. But it would not be accurate to say that historians have ignored women. The study of women's history long antedated the rise of the contemporary feminist movement. Mary Beard, Page Smith, Robert Riegel, and Eleanor Flexner were only a few of the authors who published famous, or notorious, studies in women's history prior to 1970. 1 Much of this work corroborated Alexis de Tocqueville's observations in the 1830s. His argument that American women enjoyed remarkable status, respect, and autonomy was supported by authors who concentrated on "great women" or wrote about women in general. Similarly influential was Tocqueville's observation that Americans "have carefully separated the functions of man and of wom-an so that the great work of society may be better performed. . . . If the American woman is never allowed to leave the quiet sphere of domestic duties, she is also never forced to do so." 2