De-Solidifying Spheres

Petra A. Tremblay December 7, 2011

History 7090 Final Paper Desolidifying Spheres

“I, who have always held virtue in high esteem and considered private things as secondary in importance, shall wear down and exhaust my pen writing against those men who are garrulous

and puffed up with false pride.” 1

Introduction

The idea that there is a public sphere, where men were allowed, and a private sphere, where

women remained, silent and governed by men dates back at least as far as Aristotle and it is no 2

surprise given the overall reclamation of classical tradition during the Renaissance that similar

language was repeated. Juan Luis Vives in 1523 “granted female capacity for intellection, but

argued still that a woman’s whole education was to be shaped around the requirement of chastity

and a future within the household.” Laura Cereta’s response to Bibolo Semproni’s opinion (the 3

quote above is part of her response) that her great intellect was the sort “one would have thought

nature would give to the most learned of men as if you had reached the conclusion, on the facts

of the case, that a similar girl had seldom been sen among the peoples of the world” makes clear 4

that the comment to which Cereta is responding held to the ideal that women should not put

themselves out into a public conversation as Laura Cereta does . So the idea of women having 5

the expectation of a “quiet” existence, staying within the private sphere definitely was an ideal

that existed. The question which it falls to historians to discuss is whether it was the ideal or

simply one ideal that existed at that time. This opens up for multiple actors, from state level,

1 Laura Cereta, “Letter to Bibolo Semproni” in Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, trans. & ed. Diana Robin (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), 80.

2 Aristotle, Politics: A Treatise on Government, ed. William Ellis, A.M. (New York, NY: JM Dent & Sons, 1928), Project Gutenberg edition.

3 Diana Robin, Laura Cereta: Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xiv.

4 Laura Cereta, “Letter to Bibolo Semproni”, 75. 5 Diana Robin, Laura Cereta, 6.

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down to individual men and women who worked both within these ideals and out in framing

women’s roles and lives.

This paper will trace how historians have used the concepts of public and private spheres in

the last 30 years in studying women’s lives in the Renaissance, particularly in an Italian context.

This historic dichotomy clearly meant something to those men and women whose lives it

impacted, and a careful use of it has allowed historians to understand “the past on something like

its own terms” while better understanding the fifty percent of the population which was 6

understood to stay in the private sphere. No conversation about women’s roles in the

Renaissance can be made without an awareness of the debate surrounding whether there even

was, or should be, a period known as the Renaissance for women. Although the idea of there 7

having been a rebirth of anything is problematic, the term “early modern” is equally difficult to

defend (after all, what is modern), and the era traditionally referred to as the Renaissance is fairly

well understood, with boundaries that largely line up to the area of interest to this study.

Even before women’s history became a meaningful methodological ideology, the role of

women was something often discussed in studies of the Renaissance. In 1860, Jacob Burckhardt

, in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, said that: “To understand the higher forms of

social intercourse at this period, we must keep before our minds the fact that women stood on a

footing of perfect equality with men. We must not suffer ourselves to be misled by the

sophistical and often malicious talk about the assumed inferiority of the female sex, which we

meet with now and then in the dialogues of this time, nor by such satires as the third of Ariosto,

6 Allan Megill, Historical Knowledge, Historical Error (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 214. 7 Merry WiesnerHanks, “Do Women Need the Renaissance?” Gender and History, (Vol. 20, No. 3, November 2008). Joan KellyGadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate

Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).

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who treats woman as a dangerous grownup child, whom a man must learn how to manage, in

spite of the great gulf between them.” This somewhat idealistic approach to gender 8

relationships of the time was unchallenged for over a century. However, in the intervening thirty 9

years, the way in which historian’s have approached women’s roles have been somewhat less

consistent. The first critiques of Burckhardt formalized these spheres as strongly bounded, in

which women’s lives were strictly contained. Over time however, the readings of these texts,

with more attention to context and structures of power power have removed some of the solidity

to both spheres, allowing the historian to see how women used their ideals to their own purposes

and how women were allowed to leave their private sphere and even supported in their own

desire to leave said location. Of course, none of this is intended to imply that these changes were

to be expected in the grand narrative of history, or that the current situation is THE final note on

the question of genderbased spheres of activity. It is easy to trace how change happened from

the perspective of the present and future historians will no doubt continue to rework and

readdress these concepts so long as there is a field of history to research. Future historians will

find ways of looking at this situations building on the history of the research, or completely

rejecting as their approaches to the material changes.

The Public/Private Marble

Joan KellyGadol was one of the historians to turn her attention primarily to women in the

Renaissance. In 1976, she published a more broadly theoretical examination of women’s studies

in history, with a focus on the preModern. In The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological

8 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (Kitchener, ON: Batoche Books, 2001), 318.

9 Judith C. Brown, “Gender,” in Palgrave Advances in Renaissance Historiography, ed.Jonathan Woolfson (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 177.

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Implications of Women’s History For KellyGadol, the use of the public/private sphere concept 10

is key to understanding gender relationships, and she argues that the primary factor in how

solidly these spheres are within a culture will be based on the economic structures that are in

place. In this study, KellyGadol argues that although “what constitutes “domestic” and what

“public” varies from culture to culture, and the lines of demarcation are differently drawn, a

consistent pattern emerges when societies are placed on a scale where, at one end, familial and

public activities are fairly merged, and at the other, domestic and public activities are sharply

differentiated” as a corollary to this, she argues that “sexual inequalities are bound to the 11

control of property.” 12

This economically determinist work in the seventies was further focused when she published

her most famous work, Did Women Have a Renaissance in 1987. In this seminal work for

Renaissance women’s history, her critique of overly rosy depictions of women’s roles, such as

that espoused by Burckhardt, a step further, arguing that there was no Renaissance whatsoever

for women, because “the advances of Renaissance Italy, its protocapitalist economy, its states,

and its humanistic culture, worked to mold the noblewoman into an aesthetic object: decorous,

chaste, and doubly dependent on her husband as well as the prince.” In this later article, she 13

does not focus as exclusively on economic issues, and instead she focuses on the role women

played in romantic literature of the Renaissance as compared to the role they played in the

Middle Ages to examine how much power was lost in this transition. However, she absolutely

10 Joan KellyGadol, “The Social Relation of the Sexes: Methodological Implications of Women’s History,” Signs Vol. 1, No. 4 (1976), 809823.

11 Joan KellyGadol, “The Social Relations of the Sexes,” 818. 12 Joan KellyGadol, “The Social Relations of the Sexes,” 819. 13 Joan KellyGadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” 197.

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connects this loss of power in the romantic literature to the control over economic production

and capital. As economic production moved out of homes and into professional and

manufacturing space, KellyGadol takes the transfer of the male “personal worth into

exchangevalue” and builds out the fact that as the economic value of work done by women 14

had no exchange value, women lost power. This loss of power is reflected in the role of women

in literature. 15

Moving out of the economic, and into the educational realm, KellyGadol agrees with Joan

Gibson’s reading of Renaissance educational trends. Both feel that although the increasing of

“Latin literacy and classical learning to daughters as well as sons of the nobility” is a positive 16

on one level; on another, both argue that the list of what the daughters were being taught was

selected to emphasize “chastity, silence, and obedience for women, courageous and active virtue

for men.” Both historians referenced the treatise of Leonardo Bruni, which was written to 17

provide a comprehensive explanation of the appropriate humanist education for a woman, as

further evidence that this education was meant to silence and contain women within the domestic

sphere. At a midpoint in De studiis et litteris, Bruni states: “For why should the subtleties of the

status, the epicheiremata, the krinomena, and a thousand other rhetorical conundrums consume

the powers of a woman, who will never see the forum?” Gibson and KellyGadol both take this 18

section as a literal statement of Bruni’s opinion of how a woman should be taught, that although

14 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell Carver (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 3.

15 Joan KellGadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance.”

16 Joan KellyGadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance,” 188. 17 Joan Gibson, “Educating for Silence: Renaissance Women and the Language Arts,” Hypatia Vol. 4, No. 1 (1989), 10. 18 Leonardo Bruni, “The Study of Literature” in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig Kallendorf (Cambridge,

MA: I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2002), 1055.

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it is fine to educate women, doing so should not undermine their contentment with their place in

the home.

All three of the above discussed articles were written during a period in history when women

were just starting to regularly be reintegrated into the historical record, very shortly after “the

emergence of women’s history as a major field of scholarly inquiry.” The studies were some of 19

the first to truly question the hyperidealistic view of women’s roles put forward by Burckhardt,

and accepted for so many years. However, because they were actively striving to find women in

a historical discourse that had long disregarded their entire existence, and to create an image of

woman that could be studied within their own milieu. Both KellyGadol and Gibson were

academics in a period where the point of women’s studies was to focus on the distinct

“separateness and difference of women in implicit contrast to the world of man or men already

known to history” This path towards distinct meaningful difference meant that the very 20

spheres that both would agree only had a negative impact on the lives of the women being

studied, became solidified, and locked into a substantive existence.

The Public/Private Wiffleball

As studies of women’s roles in the past expanded beyond the initial need to create a new

history of women, historians began to look more closely at the exceptions, those women who

were clearly refusing to be wholly relegated to the spinning wheel and birthing bed. The women

studied in these situations are those who were often viewed as exceptions even during their own

lives: Laura Cereta, the fifteenth century letterwriter who argued for the education of women

19 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), 194. 20 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 195.

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and their place in political and religious activities, Battista da Montefeltro, for whom Leonardo 21

Bruni drafted his treatise arguing, in the most conservative reading, for a thorough education 22

for women. The attention to exceptional women who were publishing, preaching and teaching in

very public ways began to soften the methodological edges of the spheres. These exceptional

women lived in a culture that held them to standards of appropriateness that expected a private,

submissive life for women, and to varying degrees the women being studied may have even

believed in the appropriateness of this expectation themselves. However, it does not mean that

boundaries were not renegotiated by individuals with the skill, opportunity or need.

Jane Donawerth’s Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical theory

by Renaissance Women is one such study. Donawerth tracks the way that women used 23

rhetoric, the most public and active form of a humanist education, which included “the

disciplined study of persuasion” in its training. She particularly looks at how women worked 24

to reframe rhetoric as a discursive project, rather than public speech. while engaging rhetoric in 25

public sites. These women use this reframing in different ways, and Donawerth asks whether it’s

possible that some of these women, for all their literacy and reclamation of an education not just

for silence, are “contributing to the demarcation between public and private that constricts

women?” Certain of the authors seem to “apologetically [insert] women into the art of rhetoric”

21 Diana Robin, Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist. 22 Virginia Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric: De studiis et litteris Revisited,” Rhetorica (Winter 2009),

48. 23 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance

Women,” Rhetorica (Spring 1998). 24 Joan Gibson, “Educating for Silence,” 11 25 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance

Women,” 187

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however, these are not always nonpolitical uses of speech, as she argues that in Les Femmes 26

Illustres, Madeleine de Scudery “appropriates rhetoric for women as a means of political power

the right to speak and, so, to influence others.” Donawerth argues that “if the ideal woman in 27

Renaissance culture inhabits a sphere in which she is silent (does not speak or write publicly),

chaste (private) and obedient (listens to the speech of the men who own her), then each of these

women use the category of “ideal woman” to challenge the nature of restrictions on women.” 28

It is not only in the realm of education that women moved outside these realms of expected

behavior. For many women, industry that brought finances into the home that were necessary to

maintain income for the household. Although much of this work was done in the home, such as

the carding and spinning of wool for weavers, studies of how various cities responded to 29

women selling in the community markets reveal that not only were women acting as merchants

in public space, but they were doing so very much in spite of the fact that their communities

were less than thrilled with their presence. A growing number of economic historians 30

challenged the belief by GadolKelly that women were horribly limited in their opportunities as

compared to women in the middle ages. Women were not only more active in the economy, but

26 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Woman,” 188

27 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women,” 188

28 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance Women,” 198

29 Merry E. Wiesner, “Spinning Out Capital: Women’s Work in the Early Modern Economy,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 234.

30 Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy 14001600, (Newhaven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

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that included mobile involvement. In fact, Brown points out that “guild records, tax records, 31

notarial records, criminal and civil law records, as well as literary and artistic sources, show

women in many occupations... some did heavy physical labour as carpenters, blacksmiths, or

skinners, carders and stretchers in the wool industry.” As the historical record is prodded more 32

closely, these exceptions to expected behavior become more visible, and historians have taken

those exceptions as areas well worth studying.

Although he is specifically looking at postcolonial modernity, when Dipesh Chakrabarty says

“The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of

force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it” it applies equally well to studies of an other 33

without modernity as a fact. These contradictions allow, in this case women, to find their way

forward as successful members of their own societies. To do this, Donawerth argues that they

“seize on conversation as permitted to women in order to challenge the construction of categories

of private and public that confine them to a certain sphere (although in the seventeenth century

there is nothing like so stable a conception of women’s sphere as obtains by the nineteenth

century).” Donawerth draws on this contradiction between the rules/ideals of the community, 34

and the reality of how women interacted with those rules to find ways out of the sphere, while it

continues to retain its solidity.

The Public/Private Bubble

31 Judith Brown, “Gender,” 178179

32 There is some debate as to whether carding would honestly be considered “hard” work. Boring perhaps, but not hard. 33 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 43. 34 Jane Donawerth, “Conversation and the Boundaries of Public Discourse in Rhetorical Theory by Renaissance

Women,” 198.

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Studies in the last decade have continued to remove the solidity of the spheres, although they

have retained their existence. Studies of the dichotomy will often often look at exceptions that

are built right into the culture itself. It is not only women who were using cultural ideals to

undermine the spheres, but men and even more broadly the state itself will support women

leaving the private sphere, reinforcing the kind of ambivalences and contradictions Chakrabarty

refers to. However, rather than the ideals being used in ways not intended by those who would 35

see women stay within the home, it is the very structure of society which undermines the

relegation of women to the private sphere.

In addition to recognizing that closer examination of cultural ideals often uncover

inconsistencies from within the structure itself. Recent studies have also created a recognition

that texts must not be treated as always maintaining internal unity. No text can be read without a

recognition of the “contradictory and heterogeneous elements, aporias, and “splicings” that trip

readers up so as to invite a more complex reading.” 36

Fifteenth century Florence is recognized as one of the Italian States which, more than any

other Italian state, consistently presented women as “subject to a rigid patriarchal control and

confined to the private, domestic realm.” However, even in that most stringently gendered city, 37

Judith Bryce argues that women were explicitly brought into public roles by the state when

holding events for high ranking visitors who have arrived. Although certainly this display was

exploitative, turning Florentine women into promotional devices, little more than “a city’s

35 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 43. 36 Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2004), 132. 37Judith Bryce, “Performing for Strangers: Women, Dance, and Music in Quattrocento Florence,” Renaissance

Quarterly, (Winter 2001), 1075.

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monuments and other resources” it none the less brought these women into a very public place 38

within Florence. Not only were they leaving their home for social events held throughout the

city, they were exposed “to the company of powerful, sometimes glamorous, exotic, or even

dangerous men.” Although only an occasional use of the women who were of high enough rank 39

to attend such balls, it does raise the question of how solid can the private sphere be for the

women living in it, if the very state which would seem to want to constrain them is bringing

them into public space. Of course, this public space is aesthetic space, not uncommonly in

private homes, albeit in the social spaces within those homes, so it is a complicated public.

Virginia Cox returns us to our friend Leonardo Bruni, who was read so literally by

KellyGadol and Gibson. Cox argues that rather than literally stating that women should not

learn rhetoric, due to their inability to access the forum; Bruni is instead referring to legal

rhetoric, reflecting a a lifelong “condescending attitude more generally to law as a profession

and a discipline.” By broadening her study from just what is said, and taking the broader 40

context of the author’s history, and which specific aspects of rhetoric he references, she finds a

more nuanced understanding of this great text in the history of women’s roles in public speech.

Cox also points out that this section is very out of character for the remainder of the treatise in 41

two very specific ways, if taken in the literal sense used by KellyGadol and Gibson. Bruni is

vocal about women learning from the best orators, going so far as to say “where is virtue praised

with such passion, and vice condemned with such ferocity? It is the orators who will teach us

38 Judith Bryce, “Performing for Strangers,” 1083. 39 Judith Bryce, “Performing for Strangers,” 1100

40 Virginia Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric: De Studiis et litteris Revisited,” Rhetorica, (Winter 2009), 61.

41 Viriginia Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Womena and Rhetoric,” 59.

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how to praise the good deed and hate the bad; it is they who will teach us how to soothe,

encourage, stimulate, or deter,” which does not read like a treatise expecting women to sit 42

quietly in the background. Further, “Bruni was addressing his treatise to a woman related by

birth and by marriage to two of the most powerful dynasties of central Italy and raised from

childhood with the knowledge that, if circumstances demanded, she might have to play a part in

government.” However, she would likely not have been a regular visitor to the law courts, and 43

if Bruni is read as using forum as a synonym for the courts, and dismissing training for legal

purposes due to his overwhelming disdain for the legal profession, the text it seems to mesh in a

more meaningful way than the direct and literal reading given previously.

Although neither of these examples in any way “disproves” the fact that the ideal for women

was that they would stay within a private space, remaining obedient and proper. They

complicate the question of what those spheres meant, and how much weight men and the state

put behind enforcing that women must stay silent and in their homes. If you take the way that

those with acceptable power in the public sphere and couple it with the way that women can use

the ideological split to their own advantage, you see that the boundaries of the spheres, although

present, have been loosing coherence as historians further contextualize and complicate

Closing

There is no question that the concept of the public and private spheres is a useful tool in

considering the roles of women during the centuries sometimes called the Renaissance. Their

path through the last thirty years can be largely mapped to the overall changes within the

42 Virginia Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric,” 55. 43 Virginia Cox, “Leonardo Bruni on Women and Rhetoric,” 67.

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theoretical framework of the last three decades, and a general movement in the direction of more

nuanced readings of historical material. There is no doubt that the attitude that a woman’s place

was in the home existed during the Renaissance, particularly in Italy, however, it was not held by

all within the community, nor was it necessarily something that constrained all women equally.

There were women who found great economic and educational freedoms, who spoke out against

the idea that women should be nothing more than homemakers and mothers. Depending on the

reading, those who spoke out were as likely to be males as females.

Although microhistory cannot be rightly said to be constructive of broad narratives of a

people or place, close studies of individual, small, situations can help clarify what an author

meant more broadly than just what he said. The multiple readings of Leonardo Bruni’s De

studiis et litteris referenced above are an example of exactly how smaller histories can help

create more meaningful understandings of broader trends. Although neither Bruni, nor his

readers, were necessarily the “bottomup” population the microhistories often focus on the kind 44

of small event, close detailed reading helps to fill in the blanks that are sometimes left for

audiences that cannot ask the author what was meant.

Although exceptions are just that, singular events bending, or even breaking, broader rules,

they reflect much about the societies which felt the need to create the rules in the first place.

Which raises the question of how to go forward when discussing women in history, particularly

when those women are creating exceptions to expectations in their own lives. If women, men

and even the structures of culture can undermine the expectations associated with gender

stereotypes, then how much power can the expectation be said to actually have. One way of

44 Elizabeth Clark, History, Theory, Text, 7576

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dealing with these situations is that proposed by Katherine Lynch, while looking at the role of

women in earlier medieval social support organizations. “Rather than trying to locate a

boundary between public and private spheres, or tracing a shifting line between them over time,

it makes more sense to think of both realms as fractal in structure, with bits of the public in the

private and vice versa.” Like every situation in which power struggles exist, it is not a straight 45

top down relationship, but rather a “process which, through ceaseless struggles and

confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses” the positions of the players in the struggle. 46

Men and women alike set aside, disregarded and used the ideals in ways that were not supportive

of the overall theory of the public and private spheres.

45 Katherine Lynch, “Social Provisions and the Life of Civil Society in Europe: Rethinking Public and Private,” Journal of Urban History, (Vol 36, 2010), 294.

46 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, (New York, NY: Random House, 1990), 92.

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De-Solidifying Spheres

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