Separate Spheres: Women's Worlds in the 19th-Century Maritimes

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Conventional Victorian thinking decreed that women belonged in the home,
looking after family and children. Everything outside this domestic
sphere belonged to men: financially supporting a family, business,
industry, law, and politics, to name just a few. The essays in this
collection demonstrate how that conventional division of authorities and
duties had more to do with wishful thinking than with reality.

Ten researchers present evidence that throughout the 19th century,
Maritime women refused to let the prescribed domestic role define and
limit their activities. The work gives numerous examples of women
entering other arenas—political, legal, church, school, factory,
etc.—and achieving their objectives in these “other spheres.”

The essays are scholarly in tone and presented with the academic fetish
for documentation of sources blazing in full glory. Footnotes threaten
to overwhelm the text, if not squeeze it off the page. A uniformly flat
statement-of-facts tone means the book will be ignored except by other
researchers and a handful of devoted social historians. The content,
however, is fascinating and cries out for a more readable presentation.