While historian Linda Nicholson sees women's participation in voluntary associations as activities consistent with the increasing relegation of women’s lives to a separate, “private” sphere in nineteenth-century Europe, historian Katherine Lynch argues that these kinds of activities enabled women to join with one another and to develop a kind of shadow citizenship within civil society, if not the formal state. These kinds of experiences were no substitute for actual political entitlements, Lynch suggests, but they deserve more attention for their importance in helping individuals forge enduring bonds of community and identity beyond domestic life. Only by limiting one’s notion of public life to formal political participation, she says, can one conclude that most women in Western society have ever been literally consigned to a separate or “private” sphere.