Women's History in the New Millennium: Rethinking Public and Private--Continuing the Conversation

In the spring 2003 issue, we offered provocative reflections by scholars from different fields of concentration on the concept of public and private. For this issue, we asked two additional scholars, whose work has been pivotal to our thinking about public/private, to reflect in turn on those considerations. In an eloquent sweep from the varied times and places that engaged our original commentators to her own field of U.S. history, Mary Ryan confirms that, despite their continuing utility, the terms "public" and "private" are not coterminous with "man" and "woman." She also reminds us that not only is the personal political, but so, too, is the public, and she insists that we need to continue the struggle for both access to the public and control of the private. Joan Landes, taking off from the original analyses, argues passionately for a move beyond conceptualizing the boundaries between public and private as fluid or messy. Rather, she suggests, a semiotic approach truly allows us to get beyond dichotomies to an understanding of contestation and power in feminist history.——Leila J. Rupp