Davidson, Cathy N., and Jessamyn Hatcher, eds. No More Separate Spheres! Durham: Duke UP, 2002. 439 pp.

by Brenda R. Weber

No More Separate Spheres is a timely and significant anthology of articles that theorize and make more complicated the governing metaphor of public (often coded male) and private (often coded female) domains in the nineteenth century. Culled from a special edition of American Literature (September 1998) and augmented by classic texts and commissioned submissions, the anthology offers both a critical repository and long-needed challenge for scholars of nineteenth-century America. Its editors, Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, have done a commanding job of selecting essays that hold together, speak to one another, and elucidate a common theme of the dangers inherent in an over-reliance on reading history as inextricably separated into binary oppositions.