Feminism and the Retreat from the Public

Abstract

Second-wave feminism had very good reason to interrogate critically the politics of privacy. The private as a female domestic space could be used to create differential values in categories of work, space, thinking, and activity, often to the detriment of women. In her introduction to a collection of feminist writings on the public/private divide, Joan Landes situates the private sphere “as a site of sexual inequality, unremunerated work, and seething discontent,” as well as “problems accompanying woman’s multiple roles as wife, mother, sexual companion, worker, and political subject,” leading to “private despair” and “private isolation” (1998: 1), which feminism was to address. As Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo pointed out in her theoretical introduction to the inaugural volume of academic feminism, Woman Culture & Society, “[A]s long as the domestic sphere remains female, women’s societies, however powerful, will never be the political equivalents of men’s; and, as in the past, sovereignty can be a metaphor for only a female elite” (42). As Michael Warner describes it: “Private labor is unpaid, is usually done at home, and has long been women’s work. Far from being symmetrical or complementary, this sexual division of labor[…] is unequal.