OXFORD READINGS IN FEMINISM Feminism, the Public and the Private Edited by Joan B. Landes Oxford New York · OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1998 Oxford University Press, Great C/arendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Sa/aam Delhi Florence Hong Kong lstanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and assodated companies in Berlin lbadan Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press lnc., New York lntroduction and Selection © Oxford University Press 1998 Ali rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press. 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Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms and in other countries should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise drcu/ated without the publisher's prior consent.ir'J �JI form ofbinding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purch¡µer British Library Cataloguing in Public�ti�n Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-875203-2 ISBN 0-19-875202-4 (Pbk.) Typeset by Graphicraft Typesetters Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on add-free paper by Bookcraft (B ath) Ltd Midsomer Norton, Somerset Contents Notes on Contributors Vil Introduction JOAN B. LANDES l. The Public/Private Distindion in Feminist Theory 1. Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture? 21 SHERRY B. ORTNER 2. Citizenship with a Feminist Face: The Problem with Maternal Thinking 45 MARY G. DIETZ 3. Models of Public Space: Hannah Arendt, the Liberal Tradition, and Jürgen Habermas 65 SEYLA BENHABIB 4. Toward an Agonistic Feminism: Hannah Arendt and the Politics ofldentity 100 BONNIE HONIG 11. Gender in the Modern Liberal Public Sphere 5. The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration 135 JOAN B. LANDES 6. Regarding Sorne 'Old Husbands' Tales': Public and Private in Feminist History 164 LEONORE DAVIDOFF 7. Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America 195 MARYP. RYAN 8. The Inviolable Woman: Feminist Conceptions of Citizenship in Australia, 1900-1945 223 MARILYN LAKE 9. The Patriarchal Welfare State 241 CAROLE PATEMAN V CONTENTS 111. Gendered Sites in the Late Modern Public Sphere 1 O. Live Sex Acts (Parental Advisory: Explicit Material) 277 LAUREN BERLANT 11. An Interview with Barbara Kruger 302 W.J . T. MITCHELL 12. Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas 314 NANCY FRASER 13. On Being the Object of Property 338 PATRICIAJ . WILLIAMS 14. All Hyped Up and No Place to Go 359 DAVID BELL, JON BINNIE, JULIA CREAM, GILL VALENTINE 15. Celebrity Material: Materialist Feminism and the Culture of Celebrity 385 JENNIFER WICKE 16. Hillary's Husband Re-elected! The Clinton Marriage of Politics and Power 409 ERICAJONG IV. Public and Private ldentity: Questions for a Feminist Public Sphere 17. Impartiality and the Civic Public: Sorne Implications ofFeminist Critiques of Moral and Political Theory 421 IRIS MARION YOUNG 18. Wounded Attachments: Late Modero Oppositional Political Formations 448 WENDYBROWN 19. Dealing with Difference: A Polit ics ofldeas or a Politics of Presence? 475 ANNEP HILLIPS Index 497 vi Notes on Contributors DAVID BELL teaches Cultural Studies at Staffordshire University. SEYLA BENHABIB is Professor of Government at Harvard University and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for European Studies. She is the author of Critique, Norm and Utopia: The Normative Foundations of Critica[ Theory (Columbia University Press, 1987); Situating the Self Gender, Community and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics (Routledge, 1992); The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Sage, 1996); and together with Judith Butler et al., Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (Routledge, 1995). LAUREN BERLANT teaches English at the University of Chicago. She is author of The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago University Press, 1991) and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1997). JoN BINNIE teaches Human Geography and Criminal Justice at Liver­ pool John Moores University. His research and teaching interests include the sexual politics of consumption, migration, and nationhood, and he is currently writing a book on sexual citizenship with David Bell. WENDY BROWN is Professor of Women's Studies and Legal Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, and Visiting Professor of Political Science at University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton University Press, 1995). JULIA CREAM did a Ph.D. at University College London. She now works for Sense, the National Deafblind and Rubella Association, in London. LEONORE DA vrnoFF is a Research Professor in Social History in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. She is the Founding Editor of the journal Gender and History and co-author with Catherine Hall of Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (Hutchinson and University of Chicago Press, 1987). MARY G. DIETZ is Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Between the Human and the Divine: The vii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Political Thought of Simone Weil (Rowman & Littlefield, 1988) and the editor of Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory (University Press of Kansas, 1990). Her essays have focused on Machiavelli, Arendt, and Habermas, as well as on feminism, citizenship, and the meaning of politics. NANCY FRASER is Professor of Political Science in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research. She is the author of Justice Interruptus: Rethinking Key Concepts of a 'Postsocialist' Age (Routledge, 1997) and Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender in Contemporary Social Theory (University of Minnesota Press and Polity Press, 1989), the co-author of Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (Routledge, 1994), and the co-editor of Revaluing French Feminism: Critica[ Essays on Difference, Agency, and Culture (Indiana University Press, 1992). Professor Fraser is also the co-editor of the journal Constellations. BoNNIE HoNIG is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is the author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell University Press, 1993), and editor of Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State University Press, 1995). Her latest book, No Place Like Home: Democracy and the Politics of Foreignness is forthcoming from Princeton University Press. ERICA JoNG, poet, novelist and essayist, is best known for her six best­ selling novels and six award-winning collections of poetry. Her work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. Known for her commit­ ment to women's rights, authors' rights, and free expression, Ms. Jong is a frequent lecturer in the U.S. and abroad. Her latest book, Inventing Memory: A Novel of Mothers and Daughters, published by HarperCollins in July, 1997, is a four-generational story told from the point of four women whose lives span the twentieth century. BARBARA KRUGER is an artist who works in pictures and words. MARIL YN LAKE holds a Personal Chair in History at La Trobe Uni­ versity in Melbourne, Australia. Her recent books indude Creating a Nation: A Feminist History of Australia (McPhee Gribble and Viking Penguin, 1994), co-authored with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath, and Marian Quartly. She is currently writing a history of feminist political thought in Australia. JoAN B. LANDES is Professor of Women's Studies and History at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park. She is the author of viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988). W. J. T. M1TCHELL teaches literature and art history at the University of Chicago, and is editor of Critical Inquiry. His most recent book, Picture Theory, won the College Art Association's Morey Prize for Art History in 1996, and the University of Chicago Press's Laing Prize in 1997. SHERRY B. ÜRTNER is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. She has published extensively on feminist theory, social and cultural theory, and Sherpa ethnography. CAROLE PAT EMAN is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles, and Adjunct Professor in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. Her books include Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1970) and The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press and Polity Press, 1988). ANNE PHILLIPS is Professor of Politics at London Guildhall Uni­ versity. Her books include Engendering Democracy (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), Democracy and Difference (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) and The Politics of Presence (Oxford University Press, 1995). MARY P. RYAN is Professor of History and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book is entitled Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, June 1997). G1LL V ALENTINE is a lecturer in Geography at the University of Sheffield. She is co-editor of Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (Routledge, 1995) and co-author of Consuming Geographies (Routledge, 1997). JENNIFER W1cKE is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She has written extensively in the areas of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, critica! thought, gender and feminist the­ ory, and cultural studies. PATRICIA J. WILLIAMS is a professor of law at Columbia Univer­ sity. She is a columnist for The Nation magazine and is the author of ix NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS numerous publications, including the books, The Rooster's Egg, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, and On Seeing a Colorblind Future. Ia1s MARION YouNG teaches Ethics and Political Theory in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh. Her most recent book is entitled Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (Princeton University Press, 1997). X lntroduction Joan B. Landes Claiming that 'the personal is political', second-wave feminists boldly challenged the myths supporting conventional notions of the family and personal life. Far from being a platform for personal 1 fulfilment, in feminist wrítings the prívate sphere first figured as a site of sexual inequality, unremunerated work, and seething dis­ content. In Betty Friedan's evocative formulation, the housewife­ the ideal woman of the post-Second World War years in the United States and other advanced industrial societies-suffered silently from a 'problem that has no name'. Housewives, however, were 2 only the tip of the iceberg. Students and civil rights activists, mar­ ried and single women, heterosexuals and lesbians joined the ranks of a resurgent feminist movement which began to name the problems accompanying woman's multiple roles as wife, mother, sexual companion, worker, and political subject. Feminism offered women a public language for their prívate despair. Consciousness­ raising groups and feminist organizations provided women with a route out of prívate isolation and into public activism. In the burgeoning field of feminist theory accompanying this new phase of activism, the problem of sexual subordination carne to be linked closely to the division of public and prívate life. Breaking the sil­ ences of personal life, feminists sought the grounds for a more egalitarian prívate and public sphere. This last point bears repeat­ ing. Whereas it is commonly assumed that feminists, like women, are preoccupied with personal life, feminism's contribution to the theory and practice of a more robust, democratic public sphere is sometimes overlooked. As the slogan 'The Personal Is Political' attests, a feminist movement moves in two directions, placing the gendered organization of both public and prívate space at centre stage. Feminists <lid not invent the vocabulary of public and prívate, which in ordinary language and political tradition have been inti­ mately linked. The term 'public' suggests the opposite of 'prívate': 1 JOAN B. LANDES that which pertains to the people as a whole, the community, the common good, things open to sight, and those things that are accessible and shared by ali. Conversely, 'the private' signifies something closed and exclusive, as in the admonition 'Private property-no trespassing'. The opposition between public and private is a distinguishing feature of both liberal and republican political argument, yet they offer practically opposing assessments of these two core terms. Liberals associate privacy with freedom: they value the private sphere and defend the individual's right to privacy against interference by other persons or the state. In con­ trast, republicans regard the private, which they associate with the body and its needs, as pertaining to those things that ought to be hidden from view. In turn, they associate the public with freedom, or acting in concert with others on behalf of the common good. Feminism <loes not map comfortably onto either of these tra­ ditions, though, like republicans, feminists value public participa­ tion and, like liberals, they see the need to expand the contents of personal freedom. However, by focusing political attention on the private sphere feminists have challenged the effects of keep­ ing the body and things sexual hidden from view; and they have denied that inherited views of freedom have applied equally to ali people or to ali aspects of the person. Does liberty, feminists ask, require that we sacrifice emotions to reason or domestic matters to public affairs? Feminism has therefore upset the firm divisions between public and private matters, which both liberals and republicans in their way maintain. Both theory and history have had a role to play in shaping new feminist understandings. His­ torians have exposed the changing, gendered contents of public and private life. By engaging with critical theory, structuralist, and post-structuralist arguments, theorists have explored the gendered construction of individual and social identity. In short, among modero oppositional movements, feminism is unrivalled in its contribution to a deepening understanding of the historical, sym­ bolic, and practical effects of the organization of public and pri­ vate life. The selections in this volume represent the exciting range of dialogue opened by feminist theorists on these tapies. They are multi-disciplinary in scope, and they reflect the historical and cross-cultural orientations of feminist scholarship over the past several decades. In comparison to the intense questioning of private life char­ acteristic of the late l 960s and l 970s, repeated reference to the private in the public discourse of the l 990s might almost seem like 2