For a long time, the emotional, more intimate and private spheres of life have not been taken seriously by historians. Only the public side of life has been considered to be a legitimate subject for scholars. Disregard of “the private” is as yet not a practice of the past, in particular when traditional historians are concerned. In spite of the “new, wide-ranging anthropological orientation” of historiography in the last few years, the marginalization of private life is, (in contrast to French and Anglo-American historical research) still the norm in Germany. The reasons for this disinterest in the private are numerous, but lie primarily in the tenaciously held, often not openly expressed, assumption that the nature of the private is in itself ahistorical. In contrast to the public, (a correlation considered to be dualistic) the private is seen as an anthropological constant, “timeless” and universal, simply a part of “nature.” The private, used synonymously for the spheres of marriage, family, and household, thus was placed beyond history, and therefore beyond historical change. This more than anything else determined that women had no “history” (Geschichtslosigkeit)—their inherited place was, after all, to be found within the context of family and household. Against this background, the binary concept of public and private appeared to be a promising heuristic tool for tracing women in history for quite sometime.

During the past twenty years a number of social historians have stopped looking at history as if observing the environment from the highest floor of a skyscraper and instead have made the microscope their most important tool. Rather than concentrating on objective, large structures and processes that are discernible from such great heights they have turned to the study of smaller entities all the way down to the single individual, taking ethnographical research methods as their guide. Rather than the study of hierarchies and class, and conflict and coalition among these large groups, popular culture, the relationship of the sexes, and the subjective side of history have moved into the foreground. How the large structures relate to individual experience, how they are perceived, interpreted, and acted upon became the central question. As a result, sweeping explanations, all too often the product of abstract logic coupled with limited awareness of the sources, are now tested by the informal, frequently quite different, and much more complex logic of everyday existence.

When European society was still divided into estates, rules of behavior covering all essential aspects of life were in effect for (and were expected to be observed by), even the smallest social group. Knowledge of the often quite subtle differences in the behavior expected and their strict observation within ones personal sphere determined the position of every individual. The adage, “Schuster bleib bei deinem Leisten” (shoemaker, stick to your last), had meaning not only for one's occupation, but extended to all areas of life. In the eighteenth century the room for movement slowly broadened for the individual. It was primarily in the educated circles that the pioneers of this process of gradual change could be found, and where the estates system itself began to be questioned. The room for mobility of those in the lower social groups expanded—to be sure only slightly—as far as one can judge on the basis of the restricted amount of sources at our disposal. But in individual cases, even people from the lower classes were able to make use of the loosening of barriers and to profit from them.