Frances Sheridan Reads John Home: Placing Sidney Bidulph in the Republic of Letters
Betty A. Schellenberg, Simon Fraser University
Volume 13, no. 4, July 2001
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
In his article on “Gender and the Public/Private Distinction in the Eighteenth Century,” Lawrence E. Klein questions the “domestic thesis” put forward by many feminist histories of the eighteenth century, a thesis which employs the two binary oppositions of male/female and public/private to account for “the persistent exclusion of women from public roles, power, and citizenship.” Klein notes that this model fails to take into account evidence that “even when theory was against them, women of the eighteenth century had [conscious] public dimensions to their lives.” He goes on to suggest that such public dimensions are made conceptually possible by the multiple sets of distinctions from which individual identities are constructed, and that “a more precise account of gender in relation to publicity and privacy can be achieved by closer examination of both space and language.”
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