Stepping Out: Rethinking the Public and Private Spheres

n the novel The House on Mango Street, child narrator Esperanza says of her great-grandmother, "She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow." 1 Here Esperanza invokes an iconic image of womanhood, one that may seem increasingly retrograde but that continues to maintain a kind of pull over our imagina- tions: the woman trapped in the home. Esperanza's great-grandmother peers sadly out the window, as do many female literary characters. And yet over the last two decades a growing number of feminist scholars have challenged the iconic status of the woman at home. They have offered documentation of women's work outside the home and have questioned the cultural baggage that has come to be associated with domesticity. In a broader sense, scholars have challenged the interpretive power of "sepa- rate spheres" ideology and have destabilized, as well, the private/public dichotomy that for many years was the overarching descriptor for men's and women's lives in the nineteenth century and beyond. Such books as Mary Ryan's Women in Public (1990), Carla Peterson's "Doers of the Word" (1995), and Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher's No More Separate Spheres! (2002) have offered complex readings of women's lives, suggesting that women were not always in the home, that when they were the home was not always an entrapping space in which they "sat (their) sadness on an elbow," and that intersections of race, class, gender, nationality, and