kinds of women. Ultimately, issues of gender seem not as divisive or press-
ing as those of race and class, and certainly it is absurd to consider gender as
a category by itself--outside the attendant realms of race and class. This
volume seeks to redress that essentialist error common to earlier studies of
gender.

With nineteenth-century gender studies now permitting an emotional
study of public man gone private, it is time to examine the assertive and
rational side of private woman gone public. Indeed, the last half of the
twentieth century showed a radical shift in thinking--moving away from
the exclusionary 1950s concept of the great man in history, or the 1960s
separatist notion of (middle-class) women's history, to a reconciliatory and
eclectic vision of genders and classes interacting. As gender roles are being
questioned at the end of the twentieth century, more scholars are interested
in reassessing the gender roles of previous generations. Specifically, men are
being accepted as a kinder, gentler, more emotional breed, and women are
being perceived as more independent, assertive, and logical. Contemporary
masculinist critics and historians of nineteenth-century American man-
hood, roused and unfettered by the ideas of the 1960s feminists, have rewrit-
ten a new male history fraught with personal vulnerabilities and anxieties. ²
At the same time, a new younger school of feminists is trying to reassess
women's history as less restrictive and oppressive and to position women in
a less vulnerable, more proactive role--so that women's story is not one of
victimization. Our changing concepts of men's and women's roles have af-
fected the way we evaluate the relationships between men and women in
the past.

This book attempts to uncover and show the commonalities--the hopes,
fears, anxieties, aspirations, and historical roadblocks--shared by men and
women (and representative male and female authors) in nineteenth-century
America, both at home and in the marketplace, thus dissolving bounda-
ries between public and private spheres and questioning or challenging the
stereotypical images of women as ineffectual or vulnerable within nine-
teenth-century society. Though this collection of essays does not deny the
existence of the separate spheres altogether, it shows the line between the
spheres to be much finer and the boundaries blurrier than was maintained
in the past. Indeed, to understand how men and women lived in the same
historical moment, it is more productive to see where and how their roles
converged and how their interactions created a national culture in flux
rather than to dwell on a separatist notion of the genders living apart or
without interaction. In such a way, the history of the American nineteenth-
century woman seems less oppressive and her influence over the public

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