The rise of public woman: Woman's power and woman's place in the United States, 1630–1970

✍ Scribed by Kristin Hoganson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1996
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 267 KB
• Volume: 32
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0022-5061
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1520-6696(199607)32:3<291::aid-jhbs25>3.0.co;2-k

✦ Synopsis

fits these women and others into a Whiggish narrative about women's growing presence in public life.

The core of Matthews' argument is that throughout American history, "public woman" has been a term of opprobrium, in contrast to "public man," which has been a term of honor. The belief that public women were sexually suspect underlay this dichotomy and operated to discourage women from seeking the spotlight. Hence, in order to gain political rights, women first had to establish a public presence in legal, spatial, and cultural arenas. What, then, enabled women to break long-standing constraints and secure meaningful public roles? Matthews argues that subjectivity, nurtured first by Puritan and Quaker beliefs and later by republicanism, reading, the valorization of private life, education, and economic independence, led women to develop their own identities, conceive of themselves as social actors, and seek a public voice. As women made gains in public life and became more comfortable asserting their sexuality and addressing sexual issues, the sexual stigma that had discredited earlier public women lost much of its force. Clearly not all visible women have been feminists, but feminism, argues Matthews, has rested on women's ability to claim a variety of public roles. Building on this insight, Matthews links the ability of an actress to enter polite society with the ability of a women's rights speaker to stand at a lectern and still seem respectable. This narrative of progress ends on a somber note: in the conclusion, Matthews observes that public women's private lives are still subject to more scrutiny than men's.

By locating the women's rights movement within a larger cultural context, The Rise of Public Woman makes an important contribution to American women's history. However, it rests on some slippery concepts, foremost among them, "public". Although a rigid sense of separation between public and private spheres was a particularly Victorian concept, Matthews presents the category "public" as relatively stable from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. Furthermore, Matthews disregards the ideological functions of the term. Historians such as Linda Kerber and political scientists such as Carole Pateman have drawn attention to how the concept "public" reified ideological distinctions and served to obscure women's political presence. Matthews' concern with how women have become public thus begs a prior question: how did the changing definitions of the public sphere affect women's efforts to be recognized as part of it?

The concept "public" is even more elusive in The Rise of Public Woman because Matthews uses it to refer to power as well as visibility. For example, she concedes that the publiciprivate distinction was more a legal fact than a social one in the colonial period. Nonetheless, Matthews dismisses women's public presence in this era by claiming that women moved through public space "under direct male authority," acting to advance family interests (22). Similarly, she dismisses working-class women's later public presence by noting that they lacked political power (221). In her treatment of the 1940s she observes there were more "public women" gainfully employed outside the home, but fewer "Public