Since the dawn of civilization, most men and women worked in home workshops and on farms. “Separate spheres” theory came into being as a way of dealing with a moral dichotomy in the Industrial Revolution: If the hard-headed, detached way of living was effective for getting productivity up, but society agreed that the soft-hearted, involved approach was more wholesome for the kids, then how would children be reared? The answer the middle class came up with was that women would be insulated from the harsh facts of busiess and politics, while boys would leave home and be trained in a completely neww way of thinking at an early age. This created a gulf of understanding between boys and mothers, wives and husbands. The men felt an obligation to protect the “better” ideology of woman’s sphere while knowing they were to think of their own retraining as the “real” ideology. Women felt obligated to prove they were ladies and be sentimental and naive even when they couldn’t help picking up how the world really worked. Literature at the time showed how both sexes felt some strain between respect and disdain for each other because of the double ideology.
But it applied only to the middle classes, who were actually the lower-upper classes. The upper-upper classes had little sentimentality and also didn’t do business. In Europe, they descended from conquerors. In the Americas, they descended from more recent conquerors and from generations of early successful businesspeople. They didn’t work anymore.
The poor were the majority, and most poor people, either sex, worked from age five or so until death or extreme disability. In the home or out, country or city, they worked long hours and faced danger and deprivation to have a chance to give their children something better. They couldn’t afford separate spheres.
We are the heirs to the world their hard work built and we now must find the way to use it with kindness and responsibility.
