Book Review: Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and Public Policy, Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates
| Published date | 01 September 1999 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399900800307 |
| Author | Therese Murphy |
| Date | 01 September 1999 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
SUSAN B. BOYD (Ed.), Challenging the Public/Private Divide: Feminism, Law, and
Public Policy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997, 392pp., £45.00 (hbk).
MARGARET THORNTON (Ed.), Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates. Mel-
bourne: Oxford University Press, 1995, 318pp., £16.95 (pbk).
This is a review of two collections which offer 1990s’ feminist takes on a linchpin of
modernity: the public/private divide. The divide is a common starting point for cri-
tique and reconstructive projects within feminism and other critical theories. But, as
many have discovered, critique of the divide is no easy matter: numerous attempts at
critique have themselves been criticised for reifying the divide, suppressing the inter-
relationships between public and private and exaggerating sovereign power and the
role of the state. The basic problem seems to be that in critiquing the public/private
divide ‘one gets sucked into the very categorisation one is attempting to undermine’
(Lacey, 1998: 83). The difficulties often start with the question of what is meant by
the public/private divide. Thus, is it a descriptive claim, a normative argument or
both? Is there a divide, or a dichotomy which privileges one sphere above the other?
And what, if anything, is the relationship between the private sphere and privacy?
Critique is further complicated by the fact that everyday life in late modern democ-
racies tends to undermine the notion of a clear public/private divide. Basically, the
separation between public and private spheres, the personal and the political, seems
to be closing up, or at least to be increasingly blurred. The reasons for this range from
the popularity of mobile phones and kiss-‘n-tell chatshows, the rise of autobiography
and docu-drama, to the ‘privatising impulse’ (Thornton, p. xvi) of late modern
governments, and the proliferation of viewing technology, from CCTV to ultrasound
in everyday life. In addition, clusters within critical theory now speak in ways which
seem quite alien to images of a public/private divide, separation or different spheres.
Thus, there has been talk of ‘beyond’, of ‘the imaginary domain’, and of ‘democratis-
ing’ the intimate sphere. The subject appears to have taken a nomadic turn, and con-
cepts like hybridity, fluidity and transgression are popular academic standbys.
Broadly speaking, the postmodern shift seems to have foregrounded the subjective,
the personal, even the confessional; indeed, it has been argued that whereas once the
personal was political, today it may be more appropriate to say that ‘the personal is
theoretical’ (Morgan, 1998: 189).
Faced with these complications, one might be tempted to box off the public/private
divide. Fortunately, the collections under review here were not tempted by this
option. They pursue a different, far braver strategy: although ‘aware of the significant
and interesting challenges to much theoretical work on the divide’(Boyd, p. ix), they
push ahead with critique in order to tease out the ‘seemingly irrefragable lifelines
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (199909) 8:3 Copyright © 1999
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
Vol. 8(3), 411–429; 009288
07 Reviews (jl/d&k) 22/7/99 11:16 am Page 411
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