Draft of proposal ... eeek

There is something there - beyond the separate spheres .... saying that the birth of separate spheres confined women to the domestic sphere assumes that women had a wider range available to them before that time.

We know that (married) women were legally invisible, and that they were not supposed to take a public role or have public opinions. There was no title for a woman thinker/writer/polemicist, no assigned space for them. So were they just accepted as harmless abberations or were they able to CREATE a space, out of existing labels, that let their voices be heard.

Was the tightening of the rules a result of industrialisation and the public sphere or was is that these women were too succesful - that they ended up threatening the social fabric because they were too good at spinning their yarns?