As I noted in my introduction, scholars have recently questioned the assumption that as a bourgeois public sphere emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, women, severely restricted in political, legal, and economic power, were aligned entirely with an opposing private sphere. According to Lawrence E. Klein, the problem with the “domestic thesis” is that it does not account for the distinction between theory and practice, whereas the evidence indicates that “women in the eighteenth century had public dimensions to their lives.” “Moreover,” he concludes, “… engaging in those public practices involved a consciousness that they were behaving publicly.” Klein goes on to suggest that such public dimensions are made conceptually possible by the multiple sets of distinctions for which no one theory, particularly not one dependent on binary oppositions, could ever account.