Separate spheres

'Separate spheres or the domestic–public dichotomy is an ideology that defines and prescribes separate spheres for women and men. Culturally located in Europe and North America, it emerged as a distinct ideology during the Industrial Revolution, although the basic idea of gendered separation of spheres is much older.

The notion of separate spheres dictates that men, based primarily on their biological makeup as well as the will of God, inhabit the public sphere – the world of politics, economy, commerce, and law. Women's "proper sphere", according to the ideology, is the private realm of domestic life, child-rearing, housekeeping, and religious education.

The idea that women should inhabit a separate, domestic sphere has been extant in Western thought for centuries, extending as far back as the ancient Greeks. In Politics, Aristotle described two separate spheres in Greek society, the home (oikos) and the city (polis). Women were confined to the private realm while men occupied the public sphere of the polis.

In the hunting/gathering communities, men are usually the hunters and the warriors, where they use tools such as spears, bows, and knives. “Men make better [warriors] because they are bigger and stronger than women in the same population”.

This phenomenon, however, was not studied until much later. One of the first social critics to examine the separation between female and male spheres was French political thinker . In Democracy in America (1840), in a chapter entitled How the Americans understand the Equality of the sexes, Tocqueville wrote: "In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different." He observed that married women, in particular, were subject to many restrictions, noting that "the independence of woman is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony", adding that "in the United States the inexorable opinion of the public carefully circumscribes woman within the narrow circle of domestic interests and duties and forbids her to step beyond it." Tocqueville considered the separate spheres of women and men a positive development, arguing:

...
Wikipedia