Further Thoughts on the Public/Private Distinction

Abstract

A part from the category of gender, there is perhaps no more widely employed concept in feminist historiography than that of the public and the private. But while the former rarely provokes controversy anymore, the public/private remains a contested category. 1 Historians have disputed the concept's meaning as well as its suitability for analyzing both universal and specific forms of gender oppression. Among the questions posed are: Is the public/private divide always an expression of male privilege? Granting the feminist insight that "the personal is political," are feminist goals best achieved through effacing or preserving a boundary between public and private? Has the public/private division been mistaken for the Victorian model of separate spheres? 2 Is the public/private a spatial, symbolic, or rhetorical construct? Is it a universal feature of human society, with endless variations? Or, conversely, is it a feature of a particular form of social organization associated with the rise of the family, private property, and the state, as Frederick Engels argued, and also with colonialism, as Marxist and postcolonial feminist scholars insist? 3