What is the importance of the public/private distinction in feminist theories?

Résumé du document

"Liberalism has only one overriding aim: to secure the political conditions that are necessary for the exercise of personal freedom" . This is why liberal theory has been constructed around a dichotomy between the public and the private sphere: securing individual freedom. Freedom is indeed secured when constraints placed upon the individual are limited. On the contrary, "The limits of coercion begin", according to liberal theory and as Shklar explains, "with a prohibition upon invading the private realm." This is why a very strict separation between the public and the private is done and "must under no circumstances be ignored or forgotten ". This distinction is the one between the State which is equated with politics: this is the public realm and civil society which is the sphere of life in which individuals can pursue their own conception of the good in free association with others: this is the private sphere. Civil society is considered as "private" because it is not governed by the public power of the State .

Extraits

[...] keeps the private beyond public redress and depoliticises women's subjection within doctrine of privacy has become the triumph of the state's abdication of women[14]”. The Romantic public/private distinction exempts family relations from the test of public justice since the right to privacy attaches families as units, not their individual members. There are then two different conceptions of the public/private distinction. Neither of these two public/private distinctions clearly invokes the family. The domestic has no place either within the accounts of the pursuit of freedom (the private) or within the necessary structural constraints which allow this individual freedom to be pursued (the public)[15]. [...]

[...] The manifestations of power in sex would not respect any public/private separation. What would appear in the intimacy would have a political meaning. This leads to a redefinition of concepts like consent, justice or impartiality. Narrowly linked to all of this is its concrete application: should the law recognise that the needs of men and women are different? “Difference” and “Dominance” theorists argue that because women have been situated differently from men and have made their lives in a world designed primarily by and for men the law has to recognise these different needs[33]. [...]

[...] Carole Pateman, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy” in The Disorder of Women, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p.107. Will Kymlicka, Contemporary political philosophy, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter p.398. Susan Moller Okin (1991: cited in Judith Squires, Gender in political theory, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p Jane Mansbridge and Susan Moller Okin, “Feminism” in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), part II, chapter 10, p. 285. [...]

[...] Challenging this dichotomy allows the emergence of feminine and feminist perspectives. Women's perspectives are brought from the domestic sphere into Western political discourse. Hence new perspectives and reformulations of Western liberal political concepts. On one hand, there is the idea of connection which is at the root of the “difference feminism” (recognising and valorising the differences between genders). The strategy here is to draw attention on the “deep gender-coding of philosophical concepts and to use their gendered familiarity with intimate connection to reformulate central concepts of Western political theory[32]”. [...]

[...] In this first part I will explain what the public/private distinction means. It is in fact far more complicated than just a binary separation between a public and a private realm since there are two versions of this dichotomy. This part has been divided into three sub sections. One is about this opposition between the State and civil society, the other deals with the opposition between the Social and the Personal. The last one analyses the limits of the “right to privacy” which follows from the second separation. [...]