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History Workshop Journal 2001 2001(51):127-157; doi:10.1093/hwj/2001.51.127
© 2001 by Oxford University Press
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What Was Masculine About the Public Sphere? Gender and the Coffeehouse Milieu in post-Restoration England

Brian Cowan1

1 University of Sussex, Brighton

This article explores the early modern historiography of the public sphere concept with special reference to the role of sex and gender in the coffeehouses of post-Restoration England. It examines the way in which normative concepts of gendered propriety shaped, but did not determine, the practical experience of a coffeehouse society for both men and women. While offering a distinction between a ‘normative’ and a ‘practical’ public sphere as a means of better understanding the nature of public life after the Restoration, the article concludes by suggesting that historians of the period might be well advised to worry less about the Habermasian origins of the term and concern themselves more with understanding the complex ways in which civil society was both imagined and experienced in early modern England.


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