The Public and the Private Good: Across the Great Divide in Womens History

A matron airs some syphilitic linen in a Brazilian court; a consort of the Sultan exercises power from within an Ottoman harem; "detachable collars" and "closed-crotched drawers" announce class and gender status; and hanky panky in the "House" of Windsor provokes scrutiny of the national budget. What could bring these anomalous and dispersed historical phenomena into one illuminating discourse? These reports, drawn from the archives of Brazil, the Middle East, Manhattan, and London, were assembled for a symposium that assessed the utility of the concepts of public and private in women's history, an editorial assignment that sent Sandra Lauderdale Graham, Elizabeth Thompson, Carole Turbin, and Lenore Davidoff on a far-flung trail of evidence. In courts, harems, lineages, and lingerie counters, they found things public and private to be so jumbled that it is hard to distinguish one from the other. The episodes in women's history cited above could not be tidily shuffled onto one side or the other of some putative boundary between public and private. At the conclusion of this exercise, Graham argued that "the boundaries between the private and the public were not so neat and crossing them never pointed in a single direction" (39). Most participants in this forum would agree. Intense examination by these skilled and persistent scholars seemed to undermine the analytical strength of a conceptual division that had been doing heavy duty in the historiography of women and gender for over a quarter century. Yet each of the historians ended her essay not with an obituary for this conceptual dyad but rather with a refrain that sounds more like "long live public and private as terms of historical investigation." Implicitly, if not explicitly, these historians all endorse Elizabeth Thompson's call for "more extensive experimentation with public and private as lenses of historical analysis" (52). Something more than revisionism, respect for the ambiguities of evidence, or prudent interpretation is at work here. These historians have assembled in one compact forum a precise and erudite brief on behalf of a venerable feminist project. Each author—indeed each of the historical incidents cited above—moves beyond a now familiar critique of the concepts of public and private as an abstract and obfuscating dualism to confirm the viability of that old feminist slogan, "the personal is political." Like the women whose stories they recount, these historians went in search of justice and equity for their sex and repeatedly came up against obstacles at the portal of what is commonly labeled public rather than private. Like those Brazilian women whom Graham depicted taking their domestic grievances from home to the streets to courts of law feminists tend to experience the border between private and public as a political bottleneck, a historical space where the pursuit of equality for women too often stalls.

A beneficiary of the evidence and ideas presented in the spring 2003 issue of this journal, I will take up the same political and scholarly project and add a brief addendum to the discussion. This group of essays draws a historical map that extends from the Middle Ages to the present, from Rio to Istanbul, taking in quandaries about public and private all along the way. These historians do not tarry very long considering metaphysical queries about whether the public and private are "real" but begin promptly to track down the analytic utility and empirical references of each concept. Focusing on those social spaces and practices that are designated as private or public in specific times and places, they ask how the two are related to one another. Are they dichotomous, contiguous, necessarily linked in any way? How are "male" and "female" configured within them? Although some working definitions of these elusive concepts might be useful at the outset of this investigation, consulting a standard dictionary only underscores the murkiness and imprecision of their...