1. Louisa Chapman Diary, 16 April 1848, emphasis added.

2. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering ; Ann Oakley, The Sociology of Housework ; Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking ; and Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework , to name a few. Some feminists also hold public life in great esteem and assert that "consciousness and personality are apt to develop most fully through a stance of civic responsibility and an orientation to the collective whole" (Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology," p. 398). Others more forcefully assert the importance of the public as the seat of all power, where men make important decisions. See, for example, Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class ; Stansell, City of Women ; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .

3. However, historians have successfully documented women's involvement in the public sphere over time, which until the past twenty years had been systematically buried and forgotten. "Women's involvements in exchange transactions, in informal women's communities, and in urban kin networks are now interpreted as having significance for extra-domestic arrangements rather than as mere extensions of women's domestic orientation" (Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Family and Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups," p. 191).

4. Anna Yeatman, "Gender and the Differentiation of Social Life into Public and Private Domains," p. 43. She criticizes feminists such as Michelle Rosaldo, and, by inference, Linda Imray and Audrey Middleton for analytically conflating the terms when they are attempting to distinguish gender differentiation from public/domestic differentiation. Imray and Middleton, "Public and Private: Marking the Boundaries."

5. Both Osterud in Bonds of Community and Motz in True Sisterhood emphasize the importance of kin networks in particular as safety nets for women in the case of death of, desertion by, or mistreatment by their breadwinners.

6. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage .