1. Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 393.

2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 7.

3. Ibid., 14.

4. Edward Casey, Getting Back into Place (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 120.

5. Ibid., 35–37.

6. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 234.

7. Ibid., viii.

8. See Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929; reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981).

9. See Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York: Random House, 1955).

10. “Home” was an important literary theme in pre-Victorian, Victorian, and post-Victorian literature. See, for example, the works of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Marcel Proust, among many others.

11. See Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986).

12. For an account of women's shifting interests from about the midseventeenth century, including nursing one's own children and running one's own household, see Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

13. See the essays in Allan M. Hoffman, ed., Schools, Violence, and Society (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1996), in particular, Nel Noddings, “Learning to Care and Be Cared For,” 185–98. There is a growing body of feminist literature outside of education on this topic. See, especially, Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

14. For the effect of this expectation on the lives of women scientists, see Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); for the connection to nursing, see Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); on the general expectation and its effects, see Tish Sommers and Laurie Shields, Women Take Care (Gainesville, Fla.: Triad, 1987). Countless biographical accounts also attest to the power of this expectation.

15. Apparently, most such subjects are approached this way—“the way we used to think” —in social studies classes. See Catherine Cornbleth, “An American Curriculum?” Teachers College Record 99, 4 (1998):622–646.

16. Reverby, Ordered to Care, 12.

17. For informative discussion of the issues, see John D. Arras, ed., Bringing the Hospital Home (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); also Suzanne Gordon, Patricia Benner, and Nel Noddings, eds., Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996).

18. Many books address the history of women's association with evil, including Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Joseph Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of Witch Hunts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989); John A. Phillips, Eve: The History of an Idea (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984); Rosemary Radford Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974).

19. For a comprehensive discussion of this conflict, see Herbert Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum (New York: Routledge, 1995).

20. See E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). However, my use of “cultural literacy” is somewhat different from Hirsch's. I would not prescribe a list of particular facts for all children to learn. Rather, I refer to a large body of cultural material from which individual children may learn selectively.

21. Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 67.

22. I would include in this category many regional cookbooks, gardening books, biographies, and much poetry.

23. Erazim Kohák, “Of Dwelling and Wayfaring: A Quest for Metaphors,” in Longing for Home, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 30–46.

24. Katherine Platt, “Places of Experience and the Experience of Place,” in Longing for Home, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 125.

25. See Wendell Berry, Another Turn of the Crank (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1995).

26. Rainer Maria Rilke, from Vergers, XLI, quoted in Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 56.

27. Gladys Taber, Stillmeadow Sampler (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959), 140–41.

28. See, for example, the account in Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, ed. Jim Fleming, trans. Philip Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990).

29. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 52.

30. See the fascinating discussion of corners in Bachelard, Poetics of Space.

31. Lewis Thomas, Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (New York: Viking Press, 1983), 140.

32. See the story in Bachelard, Poetics of Space, 19. It is drawn from Carl G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of Soul (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955).

33. Robert Frost, “The Witch of Coös,” in Complete Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1949), 247–52.

34. Thomas, Late Night Thoughts, 142.

35. Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea, 104.