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Separate spheres 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 separate spheres ideology presumes that women and men are inherently different and that distinctive gender roles are natural. ==History== 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''. 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 Alexis de Tocqueville.〔 Full text available (online )〕 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: although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked...to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply,—to the superiority of their women. The notion of separate spheres managed to prevail in the dominant mainstream consciousness as well-founded, or at the very worst harmless, until the mid-20th century when historians and feminist theorists began to take a much more critical stance toward the separate spheres ideology and its impact on women's lives.〔 Betty Friedan's ''The Feminine Mystique'' asserted that women were being forced to rely on their husbands and children as the sole sources of their identity by an historically constructed oppressive paradigm, not by any "intrinsic" predisposition. Drawing on Friedan, historian Barbara Welter identified a "Cult of True Womanhood", an ideal of femininity prevalent among the upper and middle classes in the 19th century. "True women" were supposed to be pious, pure, submissive, and domestic. Domesticity, in particular, was regarded as a laudable virtue as the home was considered a woman's proper sphere. Unlike Tocqueville, Welter and other 20th-century historians were critical of the separate spheres ideology, seeing it as a source of women's denigration.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Separate spheres」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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