Separated by Their Sex

Mary Beth Norton is one of the founding mothers of early American women’s history. Her most influential work is the pathbreaking Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (1980), in which she contended that the American Revolution improved many women’s lives and broadened their consciousness, though it brought them no new political or legal rights. As Norton notes, this book is a prequel to Liberty’s Daughters. Norton had found that in 1750, men and women alike considered the “fair sex” inferior and largely irrelevant to the world beyond their households. In Separated by Their Sex, she searches for the origins of this paradigm and specifically for its signature dichotomy of male/public versus female/private. For much of the seventeenth century, social rank trumped gender, and aristocratic women wielded political power in England and its American colonies. Although Norton’s research is wide-ranging, her most compelling example of a politically astute and activist aristocratic woman is Lady Frances Berkeley, who used personal connections, hospitality, and gossip to support her husband—Virginia’s unfortunate governor during Bacon’s Rebellion (1676)—and to protect his property and political allies. Norton also suggests that group petitions filed by elite women in Massachusetts were far more likely to succeed than those submitted by women of lesser rank. Nevertheless, poor and middling women in England and in the colonies spoke out on political matters during the seventeenth century. While many criticized activist women and their opinions, Norton argues, few unequivocally asserted that all women should be excluded completely from political life

Colonialism · Elite · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law

• Whither History of Women in the Americas

  Open Access•Ann Schofield•History of Women in the Americas•2013

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