Conclusion

Abstract

This study has explored whether middle-class and elite New York women, acting within the framework of contemporary American culture, contributed through their actions to the structural transformation that resulted in the division of this culture into man’s and woman’s spheres. In exploring this issue we have looked on the separation of the home and the workplace—the spatial expression of the division of the spheres—as a watershed. I have argued that, if we could see the social practices associated with woman’s sphere beginning in the combined homes and workplaces of these groups, this finding would indicate that the women, through their practices, actively contributed to the development of woman’s sphere and to the transformation itself. If we could not see these changes beginning before the home separated from the workplace, this finding would suggest that women simply reacted or adapted to changes that were initiated in the larger society. The evidence presented in this study indicates that many of these changes did indeed begin before the separation of the home and the workplace and therefore suggests that women must be regarded as active agents in the redefinition of gender and the transformation itself.

[O]ur furniture was a bed and bedstead, one pine table (value of fifty cents), three Windsor chairs, a soup-pot, tea-kettle, six cups and saucers, a griddle, frying-pan and brander. It was enough—it was all we wanted.... Now we have carpets to shake, brasses to scour, stairs to scrub, mahogany to polish, china to break, servants to scold; and what does it all amount to?

Grant Thorburn (1834), comparing his household goods at the time of his marriage in 1797 with those of 1834