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Private Women and the Public Realm

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Tracy C. Davis
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Extract

Following the translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.

Type
Special Section: Feminists Theorize the Past
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , May 1994 , pp. 65 - 71
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1994

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References

Endnotes

1 Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1989) 7Google Scholar, quoting Schmitt, Carl, Verfassungslehre (Berlin: 1957) 208ffGoogle Scholar.

2 Habermas (1989) 11.

3 Habermas (1989) 14.

4 See especially Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 I am thinking particularly of Carlson's, MarvinPlaces of Performance: the Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, and to some extent McConachie's, BruceMelodramatic Formations: American Theatre and Society, 1820–1870 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992) as examples of the discursive power invested in geographical and social realms of the public.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 McLaughlin, Lisa, “Feminism, the Public Sphere, Media and Democracy,” Media, Culture and Society 15.4 (October 1993): 603CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Fraser, Nancy, “Sex, Lies, and the Public Sphere: Some Reflections on the Confirmation of Clarence Thomas,” Critical Inquiry 18.3 (Spring 1992): 609CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 The question is taken up in Millett, Kate, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1970) 104Google Scholar.

9 Fraser (1992) 609.

10 See Davis, Tracy C., Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1977)Google Scholar.

12 Fleming, Marie, “Women and the ‘Public Use of Reason,’” Social Theory and Practice 19.1 (Spring 1993): 46–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Fraser, Nancy, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Calhoun (1992) 124Google Scholar.

14 Bassnett, Susan, “Struggling with the Past: Women's Theatre in Search of a History,” New Theatre Quarterly 18 (May 1989): 110Google Scholar.

15 See Howe, Elizabeth, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

16 Blair, Juliet, “Private Parts in Public Places: The Case of Actresses,” Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Ardener, Shirley (Oxford: Berg, 1993) 200Google Scholar.

17 Calhoun (1993) 13. See also Landes, Joan, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

18 Blair (1993) 214, s.a. 203.

19 Fraser (1992) 610.