ABSTRACT
As I have argued, feminist political theorists and feminist geographers’ analysis of the public/private divide has taken an approach that encompasses the history of separate spheres, but is not confined to the study or critique of separate spheres in the nineteenth century. And, as I argue in chapter one, it is important to recognize that this recent feminist critique is part of a much longer history of women’s struggle to redefine the relation between public and private realms. Contemporary gender relations cannot be understood, critiqued, or reconfigured unless we understand the complex workings of “guiding fictions” and “metaphors” of the public/private divide in political, social, and private life, and how they have produced effects that are both constitutive of reality and a mystification of it. The successes and failures of the arguments of speakers at the Congress of Representative Women, of middle-class female urban reformers, and writers such as Glasgow, Hurston, and Smedley provide us with the historical context that helps us approach contemporary theorizations of gender with an eye to the complexity of the public/private and women’s challenge to this divide.
