Feminism, the Public and the Private*

Conceptualizations of the public and the private have always been central to the politics of second-wave feminism. The slogan, “the personal is political,” implied that private life was often the site, if not the cause, of women’s oppression. In 1974, some of the authors of Woman, Culture and Society (Lamphere and Rosaldo 1974), one of the founding texts of academic feminism, asserted that the universal cause of women’s oppression lay in their confinement to the domestic sphere. Since that time, anthropologists have modified and complicated their assertions about the private. ¹ Many other scholars have turned to confronting the meaning of the public. Joan Landes’s anthology represents an important stage in this development.

Landes divides the book into four parts. Part I, “The Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theory,” begins with the oldest essay in the book, Sherry Ortner’s “Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?,” published originally in Woman, Culture and Society (Lamphere and Rosaldo 1974). Mary Dietz’s “Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem of Maternal Thinking,” a critique of Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Bonnie Honig’s “Towards an Agonistic Feminism,” a defense and “radicalization” of Hannah Arendt, also appear in this section.

Seyla Benhabib’s “Models of Public Space” lays out two important themes: 1) the fact that the split between the public and the private always has been and, she avers, should always remain open to negotiation and 2) the need to take into account and to criticize the work of German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas. “All struggles against oppression in the modern world begin by re-defining what had previously been considered ‘private,’ non-public, and non-political issues as matters of public concern, as issues of justice, as sites of power which need discursive legitimation” (Landes 1998, 77). Benhabib rejects both Arendt’s agonistic republicanism and liberalism in favor of Habermas’s radically procedural approach, which, she contends, offers a way to contest the rigid distinctions Habermas posed between public and private, justice and the good life, norms and values, and needs and interests.

The analysis of Habermas continues in Part II, “Gender in the Modern Liberal Public Sphere,” which deals with the history of the public sphere from the Enlightenment through the establishment of what Carol Pateman calls in her essay, “The Patriarchal Welfare State.” In “The Public and Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” Landes criticizes Habermas’s universalizing and textualizing tendency. Like several other authors in this volume, Landes calls for a conception of the public that includes embodiment, iconicity, theatricality, unruliness, affectivity, and particularity as well as the Habermasian rational discourse that masks its origin and interests as universality.

Lenore Davidoff is less interested in criticizing political theory than in showing how historians and others must look carefully at the ragged edges of the public, the semi-public, and the private spheres to understand how Victorian women and men of a variety of social classes came to define others and themselves in terms of rationality, individuality, the market, and property. Temporal and contested as these boundaries were, however, they still yielded the powerful construction of women as embodied and sexual, and men as rational, economic, and political.

Mary Ryan’s more raucous U.S. nineteenth-century publics, depicted in “Gender and Public Access,” evolved from a putative universal common good public based upon the civic virtue of the (Habermasian) bourgeoisie to a politics that inhered to the gender characteristics of males—until feminists fought their way in. By showing how lower-class men and, then, women posed liberatory demands by going public, she offers a historical support to Benhabib’s analysis. Like Landes, Ryan contends that theatricality and particular interests are not antithetical to a democratic public. Marilyn Lake’s “The Inviable Woman: Feminist Conceptions of Citizenship in Australia, 1900–1945” examines how white women brought to their politics an identification with sexually abused aboriginals and prostitutes, underscoring, again, the theme of women’s embodiment.

Part III, “Gendered Sites in the Late Modern Public Sphere,” is almost necessarily the most uneven. But many readers may find the variety of styles and presentation a nice respite. The emphasis is on representations. Lauren Berlant’s “Live Sex Acts” takes on the various attempts from the condemnation of the NEA to Catharine MacKinnon to Tipper Gore to restrict public sexual expression and to maintain, as she puts it, a dead and infantile brand of citizenship. W. J. Mitchell presents an interview with the feminist artist, Barbara Kruger (unfortunately without illustrations); Erica Jong in “Hillary’s Husband Re-elected” shows how little a First Lady can control her image and how much she has had to control her body, her hair, her very self. In “On Being the Object of Property,” Patricia Williams muses on her own contradictory identities and how our concept of rights must reflect these complexities. Jennifer Wicke’s “Celebrity Material” cautions us to take the celebrity feminists (for example, Camille Paglia) seriously.

Two essays stand out. Nancy Fraser’s “Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas” raises the issue of who has the right to draw the line between their public and private lives. In the hearings, Clarence Thomas did and Anita Hill did not. Therefore, Fraser does not fully share Benhabib’s optimism about making the private public. While Fraser agrees that publicity is an important weapon against the tyranny of the state and patriarchy, she also cautions that publicity is not “always and unambiguously an instrument of empowerment and emancipation. For members of subordinate groups, it will always be a matter of balancing the potential political uses of publicity against the dangers of loss of privacy” (Landes 1998, 332).

Four British authors collaborated on “All Hyped Up and No Place to Go,” which describes the ways that “gay skinheads” and “lipstick lesbians” do or do not create queer space. This piece is refreshing in the way it airs important disagreements about the efficacy of certain kinds of performativity as political strategies. The writers on “gay skinheads” reject black criticism of their choice of image as racist on the grounds that the most important goal of their praxis should be to reveal the constructedness of the heterosexist skinhead image. By contrast, the other authors take a broader view and criticize “lipstick lesbianism” as an insufficient challenge to heterosexuality and to patriarchy. What debates these authors must have had!

In Part IV, “Public and Private Identities,” Iris M. Young’s “Impartiality and the Civil Public” reiterates (in part because her own work is cited) the necessity of legitimating affectivity and desire in the public sphere. We should not think of the private, Young writes, as what the public excludes (like emotion), but rather what “any individual has a right to exclude others from” (Landes 1998, 441).

In “Dealing with Difference: A Politics of Ideas or a Politics of Presence,” Anne Phillips delineates how we can represent identities as well as ideas. She gives several examples of how this has been or can be done, and cautions against setting up “ideas as the opposite of political presence,” of treating ideas as totally separate from those who carry them (Landes 1998, 491).

Wendy Brown’s “Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political Formations” also examines identity politics. She asks, how can we assert ourselves politically without resubordinating ourselves? How can we act efficaciously when we have all undergone, in the process of having been made marginalized, the logics of pain? Such pain leads to ressentiment and the politics of recrimination. This kind of identity politics, Brown avers, is forgetful of the critiques of capitalism and measures its position against the standards of bourgeois liberalism. It has lost its historical direction. The solution that Brown offers is a Nietzschean forgetfulness, a supplanting of the language of “I am” with that of “I want” in an effort to “rehabilitate the memory of desire . . . prior to its wounding” (Landes 1998, 469). She stresses that this is not a psychological solution, but a political one. This dense, rich essay was my favorite, because it made me feel as well as think its truths.

Landes has done a great service in bringing these previously published essays together. All are stimulating; many are truly excellent. Yet I wonder: Where is the private in this analysis? What are its distinctive functions, comforts, and benefits? Are some of the authors too sanguine about our ability to protect our private lives? What might be the dangers of legitimating an embodied and particular political presence (and multiple, raucous publics)? As I conclude this review, President Clinton has been impeached for a private act made public, and the most public act of all, the bombing of another country, has raised little debate. These events should force us to confront anew our conceptualizations of the public and the private—as well as our presence and role in public life. The discussion, to which this volume makes a significant contribution, continues.