Mary Beth Norton, the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of History at Cornell and a leading scholar of gender in early America, has published a major new work that challenges assumptions about women's roles in Anglo-American societies prior to the American Revolution.

Norton will present her new book, "Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World" (Cornell University Press), Friday, April 1, at 2:30 p.m. in the Cornell Store Book Department.

In the book, Norton shows how gender came to determine the right of access to the Anglo-American public sphere by the middle of the 18th century. Earlier, high-status men and women alike had been recognized as appropriate political actors, as exemplified during and after Bacon's Rebellion of 1675-76 in the Virginia colony by the actions of -- and reactions to -- Lady Frances Berkeley, wife of Virginia's governor. By contrast, when the first ordinary English women to claim a political voice directed group petitions to Parliament during the civil war of the 1640s, men relentlessly criticized and parodied their efforts. Still, as late as 1690, high-status Anglo-American women's political interests and opinions were publicly acknowledged, says Norton.

Norton traces the profound shift in attitudes toward women's participation in public affairs to the age's cultural arbiters, including John Dunton, editor of the Athenian Mercury, a popular 1690s periodical that promoted women's links to husband, family and household. Fittingly, Dunton was the first author known to apply the word "private" to women and their domestic lives. Subsequently, the influential authors Richard Steele and Joseph Addison (in the Tatler and the Spectator) advanced the notion that any woman's participation in politics -- even in political dialogues -- was "absurd."

They and many imitators on both sides of the Atlantic argued that all women should confine themselves to home and family, a position that American women themselves had adopted by the 1760s. Colonial women incorporated the novel ideas into their self-conceptions; during such "private" activities as sitting around a table drinking tea, they worked to define their own lives. On the cusp of the American Revolution, then, a newly gendered public-private division was firmly in place, according to Norton.

"Separated by Their Sex" is the final volume of three that examine the interplay of gender, society and politics in America from the beginnings of settlement to approximately 1750, begun with "Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society" (1996), followed by "In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692" (2002). These three form a prequel to "Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800" (1980).

Norton is an award-winning author who has been a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist. The winner of numerous fellowships and awards, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Society of American Historians. She was also recently elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin.

Following a presentation on "Separated by Their Sex," Norton will lead a question-and-answer session. Light refreshments will be available throughout the event, and copies of the book will be discounted 20 percent.