Any historian of eighteenth-century England, especially London, examines the emerging "middle ranks", but they often neglect to address how gender shaped the growing middle-class identity. The importance of gender in the formation of a middle-class identity is often not apparent because the arenas in which gender was regularly debated, like pleasure gardens, are not studied. Examining public spaces like pleasure gardens demonstrates the limitations imposed on women's history by "separate spheres” historiography and contributes to our understanding of women's work because it shows that women worked outside a domestic economy. In pleasure gardens, middling and working women encountered each other while they challenged gender expectations and with their behavior, they laid the cultural foundations of a later feminist movement. The ability to pursue leisure was an important facet of middle-class life and in studying places of public democratic leisure like pleasure gardens, we begin to see shared ideas of gender emerging in popular culture. / Master of Arts