The Interweave of Public and Private: Women's Challenge to American Society

The A. analyzes the social and ideological changes in American society that resulted in the definition of the world as containing two spheres, the private sphere of women and the public sphere of men, and the consequences of this view. It is argue that the two-spheres imagery was an ideological tool used to justify restrictions on women's involvements in economic and political activity and men's involvements in family and community. The ideology was, and still is, an artificial polarity that ignores the continuum of social relations in real life and which has become increasingly dysfunctional to modern life.