Space, Public and Private

The distinction between public and private, like many dichotomies, has been criticized by feminist scholars as part of a nexus of ideas that mark women as inferior. Other dichotomies that are related to and reinforce the public/private distinction are: male/female, rational/emotional, culture/nature, and universal/particular. In order to understand how the public/private distinction impacts women's daily lives, it is necessary to analyze the different, but overlapping, conceptions of "public" and "private" and to consider how these ideas have taken material form in various cultural settings.

THREE MEANINGS OF "PUBLIC"

The political idea of a public sphere and the corresponding concept of a private sphere is a distinctive feature of post-Enlightenment Western democracies. In the West, at the time of the U.S. and French Revolutions, the idea that there exists a corporate body called "the public" that can express its opinions and can also be the sovereign power came into existence. An examination of this historical emergence of the public sphere reveals three related meanings of the words public and private.

As Western democracies first took form, people needed a space in which to meet, discuss their positions on governmental matters, and to express them. Ideally, a unified public opinion that adequately expressed what would be good for the country as a whole would emerge from rational debate. Therefore, public space needed to have three related qualities. First, it needed to be accessible to all. The democratic ideal calls for the participation of everyone in the society. Thus, one meaning of public is "open" or "accessible." Second, everyone present in a public setting should have an equal say. In an ideal democratic state, no person's opinion should count more than any other person's, so issues of status should be overlooked. Therefore, a public space should be neutral. Last, if all goes as intended, the people present in a public space will develop and express a public opinion that is truly beneficial to the public welfare, rather than to private interests. This has been called the discursive public sphere.

The public sphere, however, becomes complicated because it follows that citizens both debate and carry out public policies in a democracy. Thus public sometimes means "governmental" when it focuses on the role of elected officials administering the decisions of the public. However, public can also mean the electorate as a whole and is sometimes opposed to the policies that its elected officials carry out. For example, a "public" demonstration against the government is a discursive public sphere just as a meeting of a governmental body is, even though the two may be pitted against one another.

Corresponding to each of these senses of public is a concept of privacy. Hence, corresponding to the openness of a public space, a private space has restricted access, as in a "private party" or "private property." It may also connote a lack of neutrality, as when "private beliefs" are contrasted with "public opinion." In contrast to the discursive public sphere, private can mean both particular and emotional. Special interest groups are concerned with their own rather than the general welfare. Emotional expressions are private, rather than part of the rationally achieved public opinion. Thus, private spaces are associated with concealment, restriction, bias, particularity, and emotion.

Spaces are constructed in relation to this dichotomy of private and public, emphasizing one or more of the meanings of the two terms. A restroom, for example, may be public because it is open to all, but it is not a discursive public space. A county courthouse is—ideally—open, neutral, and discursive. This does not make it more public than the restroom, however. Instead, public is a flexible term that shifts emphasis from one or more of these meanings in different contexts. When the governmental meaning is stressed, public excludes the world of commerce as well as private homes; but when the contestatory discursive sphere is emphasized, the world of work, special interests groups, and other elements of "civil society" become the location of the public sphere.

Just as the location of the "public" can be shifted, spaces can become more or less private in different contexts. A house is private property, but there are more restrictions on admittance as well as more emotional connection to the bedroom than there is to the living room. Further, one's kitchen, normally understood as a private place, can house a discursive public sphere when a group of women meet there to discuss politics.

WOMEN IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE

Women have historically been associated with the private sphere and with private places such as the home. Women have been described as naturally more emotional and self-interested than men, as well as more fragile. Based on this understanding of women it has seemed appropriate that women remain in the private sphere, where their perceived fragility can be protected and their irrationality can be removed from the discursive public. This view is, of course, false; but it has, nevertheless, shaped societies globally.

Containing women in private has been achieved in many ways. In the United States, the ideology that "a woman's place is in the home" coupled with the lower pay that women receive in most occupations has, historically, kept women tied to the private sphere. The threat of rape in most societies has limited women's forays into the public sphere, especially at night. As Lila Abu-Lughod (1985) observes, among the Awlad 'Ali Bedouins, women and men are not spatially separated into private and public areas but maintain their separation through behaviors like women's veiling and avoiding looking in a man's face.

The slipperiness of the terms public and private has made it difficult for women, persons of color, and other non-powerful persons to gain full admittance to the public sphere. The expansion of the electorate formally opens the public sphere to women; however, the understanding of the public as neutral and/or nonemotional often works to tokenize their inclusion. Feminists have argued that the purportedly neutral public sphere is in actuality masculine, although that masculinity is masked. The calm, rational neutrality expected of citizens in the public sphere is associated with masculine behavior. Thus as women are admitted to the public sphere, they find themselves with a dilemma. They can present themselves as masculine, wearing clothing that mimics male attire, or they can present themselves as feminine and, therefore, mark their inappropriateness in the male public sphere.

Powerful women in the West have tended to opt for the first technique, as the attire and demeanor of women elected to public office attests. This mode of inclusion in the public sphere, however, can keep a woman from being able to present the needs of women into the discursive development of public policy. She may feel that she needs to steer clear of feminist issues in her attempt to come off "neutral" (or, in other words, masculine). Thus, although she is included in the public, it is only a partial inclusion, because she leaves many of her own interests behind. This has been the experience, also, of women in socialist countries, such as China, where state-sponsored feminist reforms led to the homogenization of the public sphere: Men and women dressed and worked alike. Chinese feminists, however, as Mayfair Meihui Yang (1999) notes, found that the state's attempt to minimize gender differences obscured the preexisting power relations between men and women as well as the unique problems of women.

The second avenue of inclusion in the public has been taken by groups such as the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, who have mobilized their status as mothers to petition for the return of their disappeared children in Buenos Aires. They do not claim to be more than private, emotional, domestic persons; yet they brought their concerns to the public setting of the Plaza de Mayo and insisted on being heard. The Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) in the United States led protests against saloons, pushing for abstinence in order to protect women in their homes. Thus, they brought issues from the private sphere into the public, but did so as wives and mothers with the intention of protecting the private sphere. The WCTU did advocate suffrage for women, but on the same basis: the protection of the (private) home.

Using both of these methods, women have gained partially successful admittance to the public sphere. However, many feminist theorists maintain that the public sphere must be rethought in order to fully admit women and other underrepresented groups. Rather than understanding each society to have one public sphere, with all underrepresented groups marginalized to the private sphere, it is more accurate to see the public as a multitude of publics in conversation, although one or a few of them remain dominant. The currently dominant public sphere is masculine, and its privileged status is achieved by domination, not superior rationality. A heterogeneous public made up of alternative publics, or "counter publics," can provide space for a more inclusively democratic development of public opinion. This view requires doing away with the Enlightenment belief in the unity of reason that leads to only one homogenous public sphere.

Some feminists also argue for the resistant potential of the private sphere. In a space set apart, women can regroup and gather strength in order to resist oppression. Thus, bell hooks (1990) speaks of "homeplace" as a site of resistance. Nancy Fraser (1997), on the other hand, views these sites of resistances as "counter publics," which must be fostered in their multiplicity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1985. "A Community of Secrets: The Separate World of Bedouin Women." Signs 10(4): 637-657.

Fraser, Nancy. 1997. Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the "Postsocialist" Condition. New York: Routledge.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1989. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui. 1999. Spaces of Their Own: Women's Public Sphere in Transnational China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

                                             C. Tabor Fisher