First published in 1996. The present volume, Homemaking: Women Writers and the Politics and Poetics of Home, enters the critical discourse on gender by way of two of its most pressing issues: the politics of women’s locations at the end of the twentieth century, and the division ofexperience into public and private. That the emergence of systematicfeminist thought in the west coincided with the invention of "privatelife" should not surprise us. Feminist thinkers from Mary Wollstonecrofton were quick to realize that the designation of the public and theprivate, male and female, was key to the subordination of women.