Feminism, the Public and the Private Essay - 1471 Words

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 womens 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 womens 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 Landess anthology represents an important†¦show more content†¦Benhabib rejects both Arendts agonistic republicanism and liberalism in favor of Habermass 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 Habermass universalizing and textualizing tendency. Like several other authors in this volume, Landes calls for a conception of the public that includes embodiment, iconicity, theatricality, [End Page 179] 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,Show MoreRelatedLiberal Feminism vs. Radical Feminism Essay1490 Words   |  6 PagesLiberal Feminism and Radical Feminism The goal of feminism as both a social movement and political movement is to make women and men equal not only culturally, but socially and legally. Even though there are various types of feminism that focus on different goals and issues, the ultimate end to feminism is abolishing gender inequality that has negative effects on women in our society. The issues and goals that a feminist may have are dependent on the social organization or the type of economicRead MoreThe Public And Private Sphere1387 Words   |  6 PagesThe understanding of the public and private spheres has been part of a number of debates in different areas of academia, particularly in political theory and international relations. 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