Dolly Kikon
The dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writings and political struggle. Eventually the feminist movement and its critique is primarily directed at the separation and opposition between the public and private spheres (Pateman 1989: 118). The public sphere is referred to the activities outside the familial while the domestic sphere usually conflates at least three analytical distinct things: the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse. The idea of the public sphere according to Habermas is a conceptual resource which designates a theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk (Fraser 1993: 110-111). The public sphere in its classical/liberal bourgeois guise was partial and narrowly based in that sense, and was constituted from a field of conflict, contested meanings and exclusion. The most consistent of these exclusions-preceding and out lasting is based on gender (Eley 1993: 1). This paper wishes to highlight some of the prominent feminist theories in the twentieth century which argued that the public arena portrayed power, inequality and domination. Most importantly, how feminist writers highlighted that the public sphere adopted a patriarchal role which rigidly marked the boundaries separating public and the private domain.
The discourse and the distinctions between the private sphere (understood as the sphere of the familial and domestic) and public sphere (understood as including what other traditions have demarcated as civil society or state) has been central to feminist analysts (Phillips 2002: 72). However critics have challenged both the possibility and the desirability of drawing boundaries between public and private, based on the suspicion that all such boundaries ultimately serve the purposes of exclusion, denigration, and domination over those designated as ‘different’. Phillips states that feminists adopt a broad definition of civil society whereby the patriarchal construction of an artificial boundary drops. For most women the private sphere is already a public realm. Thus feminism is more inclined to blur these distinctions. This reflects what has been an important theme in feminist thinking: the idea that conceptual frameworks are deeply flawed by the way they have dealt with gender and that most require fundamental revision (Phillips: 2002. 74). Generally women’s lives are deeply embedded in the household and the family. Household and family overlap and intermesh in ways that defy analysis. Yet, in common parlance, these two terms are used interchangeably. The household choices are in turn circumscribed by the larger socio-economic order.
Thus feminist writers point out that women’s position within the household is subject to the additional influence of the placement of the household in the social hierarchy (Krishnaraj 1989: 17-20). The kitchen has been often portrayed as a non-political space. It is not only a place of work for women, but it is also the hub of the household, the heart of the home and thereby becomes a metaphor for family life. Therefore, the ideal family was the conjugal family, whose male head represented the interests of the entire family in public life. The female, in contrast, remained silent in all public arenas. Ironically, household work and the processes of reproduction and child rearing went unnoticed. Rai highlights that such patriarchal norms have been pertinent in defining what ‘official’ work ought to be. Thus, the definition of labour markets has been traditionally problematic for women because their work, being unwaged, was excluded (Rai: 2002. 94). This is not the case with men. Take the role of the worker in a male –dominated, classical capitalist societies. This role is a masculine role-and not just in the relatively superficial statistical sense. There is a deep sense in which masculine identity is bound up with the breadwinner role. Masculinity is in large part a matter of leaving home each day for a place of paid work and returning with a wage that provides for one’s dependents. It is this internal relation between being a man and being a provider that explains why in capitalist societies unemployment is often not just economically but also psychologically devastating for men. It also sheds light on the centrality of the struggle for a ‘family wage’ which highlighted a struggle for a wage conceived not as a payment to a genderless individual for the use of labor power but rather as a payment to a man for the support of his economically dependent wife and children-a conception that legitimized the practice of paying women less for equal or comparable work. Ironically, women in the workplaces are seen differently. The masculine subtext of the worker role is confirmed by the vexed and stained character of women’s relation to paid work in male dominated, classical capitalism. Terms like ‘working mothers’ and ‘working wives’ that is, as primarily wives and mothers, who happen, secondarily to ‘go out’ as ‘supplemental earners’. These differences in the quality of women’s presence in the paid workplace testify to the conceptual dissonance between femininity and the worker role. This confirms the masculine subtext of that role. It confirms that the role of the worker, which links the private (official) economy and the private family in male-dominated, capitalist societies, is a masculine role (Fraser: 1989. 124).
One of the reasons that women were excluded from Habermas’s conception of the public sphere was because women did no conform to the qualifications of rational-critical discourse. In this context the Habermas model is incomplete and masculinist. His allegedly unbiased universal mode of democratic communication is re-cast as an ideal built by men in their own image and explicitly against the image of women. It is a model that continues to hide domination and mechanisms of exclusion…..in the name of universal means of communications, debate, and publicity (Rabinovitch: 2001. 348). There is a greater challenge for women since the boundaries of what is defined as ‘political’ and what is ‘non-political’ is largely at the hands of the state and the public sphere. For instance, in male-dominated, capitalist societies, what is ‘political’ is normally defined contrastingly over against what is ‘economic’ and what is ‘domestic’ or ‘personal’. In the same manner, domestic institutions depoliticize certain matters by personalizing and/or familiarizing them; they case these as private-domestic or personal-familial matters in contradiction to public, political matters. Fraser gives the example of wife battering. If wife battering is enclaved as a ‘personal’ or ‘domestic’ matter within male-headed restricted families and if public discourse about this phenomenon is canalized into specialized publics associated with family law, social work psychology of ‘deviancy’ then this serves to reproduce gender dominance and subordination (Fraser: 1989. 168).
Women’s attention has been drawn to the way in which one is encouraged to see social life in personal terms, as a matter of individual ability or luck in finding a decent man to marry or an appropriate place to live. Feminists have emphasized how personal circumstances are structured by public factors, by laws about rape and abortion, by the status of ‘wife’, by policies on child-care and the allocation of welfare benefits about the sexual division of labour in the home and workplace. However, the private or personal and the public or political are held to be separate and irrelevant to each other. Fraser points out to the ‘counter-publics’ around the nineteenth century where women creatively used the heretofore quintessentially ‘private idioms of domesticity and motherhood as spring boards for publicity. This process has been witnessed across the continents where issues of domesticity and the ‘private’ domain has been contested upon and challenged by various women’s movements, at times leading to policy makeovers.
Pateman extends the discourse and argues that women have been never completely excluded from public life. But the way in which women are included is grounded, as firmly as their position in the domestic sphere, in patriarchal beliefs and practices. For example, even many anti-suffragists were willing for women to be educated, so they could be good mothers, and for them to engage in local politics and philanthropy because these activities could be seen, as voting could not, as a direct extension of their domestic tasks. Today, women still have, at best, merely token representation in authorative public bodies; public life, while not entirely empty of women, is still the world of men and dominated by them. The role of the working-class wives having had to enter the ‘public world’ of paid employment to ensure the survival of their families is one of the most striking features of post-war capitalism. However, their presence only serves to highlight the patriarchal continuity that exists between the sexual division of labour and the workplace. It is ‘forgotten’ that the worker, invariably taken to be a man, can appear ready for work and concentrate on his work free from the everyday demands of providing, washing and cleaning, and care of the children, only because these tasks are performed unpaid by his wife. And as she is also a paid worker she works a further shift at these ‘natural’ activities (Pateman: 1989. 132).
Stivens underlines the ‘absence’ of gender dynamics in class politics. The British colonial regime left behind a legacy of large business and plantation. However, few accounts of class in Malaysia discuss women, apart from young women factory workers. Otherwise the discussion on class generally subsumes the women’s class situation in that of the household/husbands. An examination of rural society reveals the seriousness of this neglect. The role of female members of peasant households as producers and as holders of small landholdings is systematically ignored in much past writing on peasantries, which mostly assumed that the farmer was male. Moreover, the ‘family and domesticity’ has been highly politicized. There are frequent debates in societies about the new ‘working woman’ and about the pressures and costs of ‘juggling’ work and home. There is often a moral panic about the role of working mothers in producing delinquent children (Stivens: 2000. 20-26).
Concepts and practices of equality continue to exclude women. Yeatman points out that a gender division of labour which would generally consist of space, responsibilities and the boundaries of the public and the private sphere involves a cultural construction of sex difference and thus varies according to the particular socio-cultural context in which it is placed. Taking the case of social science Yeatman states that the most fundamental challenge (meaning the concerns and standards of relevance in this academic field) to the ruling paradigms in contemporary social science comes from requiring them to accommodate the distinctive world of women (domestic life, family life, or, personal life). Since there is already an established history of modern family within contemporary social history this claim may appear odd. Yet her point concerns about the nature of this accommodation. Women in their distinctive domestic role and the domain of the domestic or personal life are accommodated but at the expense of being located as the lesser part of a dual ordering of social life. While the other part concerns the public aspects of our social existence, a world with which men are still more identified than are women. Accordingly, economy is placed in the centre of the theoretical space which social science constructs, while love is consigned to the margins if it receives a place at all (Yeatman: 1987. 158-159).
Thus, do cultural constructions shape the formation of the socio-political societies or do they take place simultaneously? Koelsch describes the classical distinction between the public and the private realms, arguing that the formulation of the distinction implicitly denigrated women and excluded personal concerns from political legitimacy. She states that historically, the public sphere is the realm of necessity. It is concerned with the creatureliness of persons, the producing of the persons and things required to sustain us as creatures. It is both cyclic and dualistic. Cyclically, there is the perpetual recurrence of events-seasons, patterns of growth and deterioration-even the body has its own daily cycle of energy fatigue, hunger and satiation. Dualistically, the cyclic aspect is often experienced as the alteration between two opposites-birth and death, sickness and health. It was in large part because of the extreme physicality of this realm that the ancient Greeks regarded it with disdain. The relationships in the private sphere were inevitably hierarchal, it was seen as natural in relations like father-son, husband-wife, and master-slave. Thus this sphere was fundamentally inequitable and authoritarian.
However, the realm of the polis, the political sphere, was distinguishable by its apparent escape from the realm of necessity. The political realm was unconcerned with the satisfaction of specific and constant creaturely needs. The real existence of the polis was predicted on the fact that those who participated in it were in a position that freed them from the creaturely concern for themselves. Only those persons who did not have to labor to meet immediate creaturely needs would be able to take part in the life of the polis. Hence, freedom from such material concerns was the condition, not the consequence, of participation in political activity. In contrast to the hierarchal relations of the household, persons in the polis were ostensibly equals. The individual was distinguished by his actions, particularly the act of speech making. Immortality of a kind came to an individual as that individual was remembered for speeches and actions. Koelsch emphasizes on two points. Firstly the emphasis laid on freedom. The condition of the political required that non-free persons provide the care and commodities, the necessities, for the free and publicly active persons thus the polis was then contingent upon the productive and reproductive labor of persons who could not participate in it. Secondly, given the biological fact of the essential and inevitable labor of female reproduction, women not only were de facto excluded from the activity of the public realm but, were graphically tied to the realm of necessity through the physicality of pregnancy, birth, and nursing. Consequently women, as a biologically laboring class, were devalued (Koelsch: 1986. 12-13).
The Habermas model of the bourgeois public sphere besides creating an exclusionist arena also contains cultural construction which continued to more rigid and hierarchal conceptions of a male-dominant public sphere . For instance, the salon culture in Europe (a culture that was in opposition to women generally) passed down historically to signify a meeting place for petty bourgeois political discussions. The clubs where private persons assembled to discuss matters of public concern or common interest had usually rules which did not accept women as members. But most of all, the promotion of a new, austere style of public speech and behavior was promoted, a style deemed ‘rational’, ‘virtuous’ and ‘manly’. In this way masculinist gender constructs were built into the very conception of the public sphere. Classical traditions were imbibed that cast femininity and publicity as oxymorons (Fraser: 1993. 114). Moreover, because the liberal public sphere demand that the only way for marginalized groups to gain legitimate entrance into it is by adopting its mode of communication, so-called processes of integration is infact assimilationist and normalizing, rather than being truly democratic (Rabinovitch: 2001. 348).
The stories of the origins of civil society found in the classical social theories revels that it is a patriarchal or a masculine order. Thus, the meaning of ‘civil society’ here is constituted through the original separation and opposition between the modern, public-civil-world and the modern, private or conjugal and familial sphere: that is, in the new social world created through contract, everything that lies beyond the domestic (private) sphere is public, or ‘civil’, society (Pateman: 1989. 31-32). However, there are attractions of the modern civil society despite its gendered positioning. If one considers civil society in its characteristically modern meaning – as a way of interfering to the terrain of voluntary associations that exist between economy and state – there are two reasons why feminism should be attracted to the politics associated with this. Firstly, feminist perspective is readily pluralist, and that pluralism flourishes more readily in the associations of civil society than in either family or state. Secondly, some of the associations that spring up in civil society have looseness, even an indeterminacy that makes them particularly hospitable to feminists (Phillips: 2002. 76-77).
Feminists use the phrase ‘civil society’ when discussing women’s confinement between (all) the public and the (really) private, because feminism is less interested to draw the line between civil society and state. This leads to two things. One, feminists adopt a broad definition of civil society and secondly feminists consider the civil society as one that expands to include family as well. Thus, they tend to highlight the intersection of private life with public existence, and demonstrate that the familial or domestic are not separate from the rest (Phillips: 2002. 71-75). Eley questions whether the ‘public sphere’ is a purely ‘political’ matter in the narrow sense of government and public administration, for instance, or should the legitimate reach of political intervention extend to other more ‘private’ spheres like the economy, recreation, the family, sexuality, and interpersonal relations as well. She lays down the feminist version which brings the principle of democracy to the center of the private sphere in a qualitatively different way. It systematically politicizes the personal dimension of social relations in a way that transforms the public/private distinction in terms of family, sexuality, self, and subjectivity (Eley: 1993. 317-318). The construction of the term ‘civil society’ excluded the presence of women. Therefore, the tasks of feminists have been to dismantle the patriarchal dominant architecture of ‘civil society’ and reformulate a women approach towards the understanding of politics through democratic processes.
Habermas overlooked and failed to examine the other competing public spheres. It is within such contexts, that feminist writers like Fraser have documented and written extensively about the elite bourgeois women who were involved in building a counter civil society of alternative, women-only, voluntary associations, including philanthropic and moral reform societies. Women creatively used the ‘private’ idioms of domesticity and motherhood as springboards for public activity. Meanwhile, for some less privileged women, access to public life came through participation in supporting roles in male dominated working-class protest activities. Thus, the public sphere was not a space bereft of class, culture, domination and inequality. There existed the subaltern counter-publics. The members of this subordinated alternative group constituted of women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians who repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. The emergence of these counter publics in response to exclusions within dominant publics, have enabled in expanding the discursive space. In general, the proliferation of subaltern counter-publics means a widening of discursive contestation (Fraser: 1993. 115-125).
Considering all the debates put forward by feminist scholars, one questions what should be the ideal public sphere. This question brings forth challenges and stimulates significant discourse among women. It is pertinent for women to participate in civil societies from the aspect of confronting issues of patriarchy and gender exclusion from the public sphere. However, true integration and solidarity in public arenas can be achieved through consistent incorporation of ideas and politics. Such processes can initiate a common framework which can be characterized by civility, which is one of the pertinent bases of civil society.
