While feminists have shared the widely accepted view that women have been [and indeed remain] oppressed, many of them have differed in their accounts of the actual origin of that oppression. For liberal feminists, the gendered separation of public and private spaces; with women being largely associated with the private, domestic sphere and men with the public one, is a major target for reform; that is reforms that would intend to equalise the situation between men and women. However, this attitude fails to recognise certain aspects of society highlighted by some radical feminists, who believe that the source of women's oppression lies at a much deeper level. Patriarchy, they say, infects the public as well as the private spheres, along with all other "man-made" institutions and their consciences, including liberalism [and thus liberal feminism itself]. The public/private distinction then, is, according to this argument, at best a distraction from the real underlying cause of women's continuing subordination. An attempt will be made below to claim that the continuing monopolisation of the public sphere by men is no more than one [albeit very important] feature of patriarchal society.
In spite of years of talk of women's "liberation", "rights" and "equality", men are found to be at an advantage in modern, western countries. Numerous studies have found that women still earn substantially less than their male counterparts. Women's jobs are also more likely to be insecure, low-paid and part-time and many feel that women who spend much of their time in "traditional" domestic and caring roles are not valued as much as "traditional" male "breadwinners". Thus women's position in society is still found to be subordinate to men and many feel to a greater or lesser extent, oppressed by what remains a male-dominated society.
Many commentators have asserted that the disproportionate positioning of women in domestic roles in private, as opposed to men's roles in the public realm has been a main source of women's subordinate place in society. As Carole Pateman has said:
Today, women still have, at best, merely token representation in authoritative public bodies; public life, while not entirely empty of women, is still the world of men and dominated by them. (Pateman, in Benn & Gaus, 1983: 296)
Perhaps even more important is the expectation that women have a natural leaning towards roles associated with "femininity", making socially-prescribed femininity appear natural and inevitable, as Oakley noted of the "housewife" role:
The equation of femaleness with housewifery is basic to the structure of modern society, and to the ideology of gender roles which pervades it. (Oakley, 1974: 29)The argument goes that this social prescription of values extends to supposedly "feminine" characteristics attributed to women that includes passivity [as opposed to male aggression] and emotionality [as opposed to male rationality] as well as a domestic orientation. Thus women are seen primarily as carers and "home-makers" within the domestic sphere while men are seen as active "doers" who go out into the world to make decisions and earn money. Women restricted in, or even prevented from participation in the public/ political sphere leads to a situation in which "the rules" are made primarily by men, in men's interest, and thus at the expense of women. It is then often argued that girls and women are socialised into feminine behaviour [and associated roles] thus reproducing these gender stereotypes and role separations, and therefore women's subordination into future generations [socialisation within the family is an issue that will be returned to later when discussing Okin and Mill].
Some writers [socialist feminists among others] see this kind of gender role separation as fulfilling a function necessary for the maintenance of capitalism. For Talcott Parsons, the separation of instrumental "bread-winning" by the husband and domestic and emotional work by his wife ensures the avoidance of ". . . contaminating the intimacy of the family home by over-exposure to the competitive rational world of work" (Jamieson, 1998: 31) .
For some feminists, usually falling into the category of liberal feminism, this separation of gender roles within the context of a distinction between public and private spheres is seen then as the primary source of women's subordination. So while social "progress" was fought for, [both historically and it terms of contemporary debates] in the public realm [by men], women were not considered a part of the process, as Seyla Benhabib notes:As the male bourgeois citizen was battling for his rights to autonomy in the religious and economic spheres against the absolutist state, his relation in the household were defined by non-consensual, non-egalitarian assumptions. Questions of justice were from the beginning restricted to the 'public sphere', whereas the private sphere was considered outside the real of justice. (Benhabib, 1992: 109)
By this account, for many liberal feminists the clear prescription for women's emancipation would appear to be the extension of rights and opportunities to women by reforming the public sphere [and its male domination]. This stance amounts to a call for "equal rights" and is mainly concerned with the raising of the economic, legal and political status of women, particularly with reference to women in the workplace and education and the raising of women's profiles in positions of authority.
However, some feminists think that this is just not nearly going far enough. To talk of boosting the status of women may ignore underlying structures that may be infused with features that subordinate them. Liberal feminism tends to ignore, for instance, the pivotal role of the "traditional" family as a source of oppression, rather than as being politically neutral as is the view of many liberals.
Susan Moller Okin, although broadly a liberal herself, takes the argument ". . .an important step away from the classic liberal insistence on the non-political nature of the family" (Bryson, 1992: 179). She has considered John Rawls's famous "Theory of Justice" (1971) and rather than rejecting it outright because it ignores unjustifiable divisions of labour by the assumption families are headed by men, She chooses to argue that Rawls's theory can be extended to include the family.
Rawls discusses the sort of society that could be designed, assuming that its members did not know beforehand what positions they would occupy in it [thus these people would plan the society from behind a "veil of ignorance"]. Rawls argues that given this scenario, people would only accept inequalities that benefited the least well off [his "difference principle"]. But the decision makers operating behind his veil were taken to be male heads of households because he assumed that the family was politically harmonious in the sense that justice already existed within it. So Okin argues for the extension of Rawls's principles to include the individuals within the family. This would have consequences that would broaden egalitarian principles and mean, for example that in households choosing to maintain a traditional family structure, all income would be distributed on an equal basis between husband and wife (Okin, 1990: 25). Okin also believes that justice in the home is linked with that in the wider society at large in two main ways, as summarised by Valerie Bryson; firstly through socialisation within the family:-it is within the home that children learn the values on which they will base their adult life, and that the virtues of democratic citizenship cannot be learned in a family based on domination and inequality. Secondly, her proposed redistribution of all forms of work will not simply free women from domestic responsibilities, but means that men as well as women will develop qualities of neutering and caring (Bryson, 1992: 178).
Bryson mentions that the first aspect was shared in the writing of John. Stuart Mill a century earlier (ibid). Mill, in line with much contemporary liberal feminism believed that the traditional family set up with male breadwinner and female domestic manager was generally the most appropriate one (Mill, 1970: 178-179) assuming the re-ordering of the family in a just manner; " -if marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of obedience" (ibid: 179), and if the wife was able to follow her individual interests and be free to consider employment opportunities, she would most likely find that in such a marriage, according to Mill, it would not be necessary to take these opportunities up (ibid).
However, some radical feminists would argue that all sections of society, including all institutions and both the public and private spheres are underscored by patriarchy, the all-pervading system of male domination and female oppression. From this standpoint, the institution of marriage is itself a tool of, and a product of this oppressive regime. Indeed liberal thinking in general is attacked by some radical feminists as one of the primary [male] discourses of power, with the liberal public/private distinction forming a principal target.
While liberals have attempted to highlight the separation of public and private spheres, many radical feminists reject this as amounting to something of a false premise and claim instead that public and private are interrelated aspects of society connected by their infusion with patriarchy. Pateman highlights the ambiguity of the liberal conception of private and public and says that this very ambiguity; "obscures and mystifies the social reality it helps to constitute" (Pateman in op cit.: 282) meaning that the supposed distinction hides the subordination of women by men under an apparently egalitarian order (ibid: 283). Underlying the complex social reality Pateman talks of is:...the belief that women's natures are such that they are properly subject to men and their proper place is in the private, domestic sphere. Men properly inhabit, and rule within, both spheres. (Ibid) [My emphasis].
The traditional family emerged, in Pateman's terms, as "paradigmatically private" in which the separation of private and public resulted in public life being conceptualised as the sphere of men (ibid: 283). Women's nature has been categorised as being orientated towards the home but perhaps more importantly, the characteristics and "natures" attributed to women are given a subordinate role in the liberal-patriarchal hierarchy. Thus ["men's"] work [in its traditional conception of paid employment] is afforded not just high renumeration [relative to women], but also high levels of societal worth.
There seems to be no logical reason to think that domestic management, including home economy, care work and the rearing and educating of children can possibly be thought of as being of less value than almost any other kind of work, unless it is within the context of a patriarchal hierarchy.
Women are thus identified with so-called "private" work within a system in which an ideology of public/private distinction has been adopted, and while this remains the case, in Pateman's words; " ...their public status is always undermined" (Ibid: 299) . What is required then, as many modern feminists point out, is both a reconstruction of social perceptions of family life that challenge the "naturalness" of the traditional nuclear family, and a wholesale reordering of what is frequently perceived as the "private"; such that child-rearing, care of elderly relatives and all the other tasks associated with the "private" or "personal" life is seen to be laid equally as the responsibility of men and women. As the feminist movement is famously apt to point out; the personal is the political, as activities which take place in domestic settings may be both crucial in their interconnectedness with society at large and the subject of a spurious ideology that implies otherwise. The categorisation of genders and gender issues around a public/private framework is misleading to the extent that it obscures the origin of female oppression which seems more likely to lie at the fundamentally patriarchal nature of society.
Copyright Jonathan Tarplee 1999.
Bibliography
Benhabib, Seyla (1992). Situating The Self, gender, community and postmodernism in contemporary ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Benn, S.I. & Gaus, G.F. [Ed's], (1983). Public and Private in Social Life, London: Croom Helm.
Bryson, Valerie (1992). Feminist Political Theory, London: Macmillan Press.
Charvet, John (1982). Feminism, London: J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd.
Jamieson, Lynn (1998). Intimacy, Personal Relationships in Modern Societies, Cambridge: Polity Press.
McMillan, Carol (1982). Women, Reason and Nature, Oxford: Blackwell.
Mill, John Stuart & Mill, Harriet Taylor (1970- Edited by Alice S. Rossi). Essays on Sex Equality , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Oakley, Ann (1974). The Sociology Of Housework, Bath: The Pitman Press.
Rawls, John (1971). A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Copyright Jonathan tarplee 1999.
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