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The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835
NANCY F. CoTT, 1997
New Haven: Yale University Press
pp. xxx + 225; $15.00 paper
The 20th-anniversary edition of Nancy Cott's The Bonds of Womanhood provides an occasion for revisiting the still widely influential text. Its topically arranged chapters build an argument by now familiar to many U.S. historians: shared vocations, single-sex education, a religion of the heart, and the canon of domesticity generated "sisterhood" and gender-group consciousness among middle-class, Northeastern, white women. The 19th-century doctrine of separate spheres replaced earlier notions of female inferiority with a model of sexual difference, creating a sense of "rising expectations" that led to greater female self-assertion and even, for a small minority, to the women's rights movement. Cott has added a new preface that locates the otherwise unrevised edition in its historiographical and political moment.
The book begins with women's work, but Cott now views the chapter on domesticity as its foremost contribution. Updating her terminology, Cott labels domesticity a discourse and recognizes that it was as significant in middle-class formation as the economic factors she originally stressed. Reviewing work by Christine Stansell, Jacqueline Jones, and others, the new preface outlines the uses of domestic discourse to police...