"Mansions, Men, Women, and the Creation of Multiple Publics in Eighteenth-Century British North America"

Mount Vernon

The evolution of the many-roomed mansion in colonial British America permitted the creation of multiple public spaces within the house itself. Using the theoretical insights of Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Karen Hansen on the nature of the kinds of publics possible in the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates how real as opposed to theoretical publics arose. As outside space and mansions formed a continuum from "public public space" to "private public space," mansions permitted elite men to control "private public space." For elite men mansions provided a social geography wherein the range of alternative publics broadened. However, that process marginalized women by trivializing the ways that heterosocial social space was used and relegating female homosocial space to the mansion's political, economic, intellectual, and psychological periphery. The eighteenth-century mansion provided gendered spaces which facilitated the integration of elite men into local, provincial, and international publics but which simultaneously contributed to a wider segregation of men and women and the exclusion of women from the political, economic, and intellectual world beyond the house. In the nineteenth century these patterns would become legitimized for the middle classes through the ideology of domesticity and the notion of "separate spheres."

Jessica Kross

1999

journal article

eng