Separate Spheres: Analytical Persistence in United States Women's History

Since the 1960s United States women's history has seen a dramatic rise in productivity, reclamation of the past, innovation of new theories and strategies, and analysis of the roles of women in society. Despite this growth, or perhaps because of it, a persistent debate about "separate spheres" has provided a common thread within scholarship of the past four decades. Original separate spheres scholarship demonstrated how the sexual division of labor intensified through industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century. Subsequent scholarship critiqued separate spheres metaphors, calling attention to the ways in which women of color have rarely had the privilege of occupying a strictly domestic realm. Such arguments only encouraged more analysis and application of separate spheres metaphors until questions about women's and men's roles in society, private and public realms, domestic and political influence pervaded most scholarship about women regardless of race, class, and region.