The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the

public sphere The public sphere (german: Öffentlichkeit) is an area in social life where individuals can come together to freely discuss and identify societal problems, and through that discussion influence political action. A "Public" is "of or concerning the ...

. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by interventions from governmental or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are

family Family (from la, familia) is a group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its members and of society. Idea ...

and home. In public-sphere theory, on the bourgeois model, the private sphere is that domain of one's life in which one works for oneself. In that domain, people work, exchange goods, and maintain their families; it is therefore, in that sense, separate from the rest of society.

Shifting boundaries

The parameters separating public and private spheres are not fixed but vary both in (cultural) space and in time. In the classical world, economic life was the prerogative of the household, only matters which could not be dealt with by the household alone entered the public realm of the

polis ''Polis'' (, ; grc-gre, πόλις, ), plural ''poleis'' (, , ), literally means "city" in Greek. In Ancient Greece, it originally referred to an administrative and religious city center, as distinct from the rest of the city. Later, it also ...

. In the modern world, the public economy permeates the home, providing the main access to the public sphere for the citizen become consumer. In classical times, crime and punishment was the concern of the kinship group, a concept only slowly challenged by ideas of public justice. Similarly in medieval Europe the blood feud only slowly gave way to legal control, whereas in modern Europe only the vendetta would still attempt to keep the avenging of violent crime within the private sphere. Conversely, in early modern Europe, religion was a central public concern, essential to the maintenance of the state, so that details of private worship were hotly debated and controverted in the public sphere. Similarly, sexual behavior was subject to a generally agreed code publicly enforced by both formal and informal social control. In postmodern society, both religion and sex are now generally seen as matters of private choice.

Gender politics

Throughout many decades, the public and private sphere have incorporated traditional

gender roles A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles are usually cent ...

. Women have mostly kept to the private sphere by staying at home, taking care of their children and attending to house chores. They were not able to participate in the

, which was dominated by men. The private sphere was long regarded as women's "proper place" whereas men were supposed to inhabit the public sphere. Although feminist researchers such as V. Spike Peterson have discovered roots of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in ancient Athenian times, a distinct ideology that prescribed

separate spheres Terms such as separate spheres and domestic–public dichotomy refer to a social phenomenon within modern societies that feature, to some degree, an empirical separation between a domestic or private sphere and a public or social sphere. This o ...

for women and men emerged during the

industrial revolution The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...

. Even

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

was traditionally considered forbidden, as "In the anxious comments provoked by the 'female pen' it aseasy enough to detect fear of the writing woman as a kind of castrating female whose grasp upon that instrument seems an arrogation of its generative power". Feminists have challenged the ascription in a number of (not always commensurate) ways. In the first place, the slogan "the personal is political" attempted to open up the 'private' sphere of home and child-rearing to public scrutiny. At the same time, there was a new valorisation of the personal – of experiential knowledge and the world of the body – as against the (traditional) male preserves of public speech and theory. All the while, the public sphere of work, business, politics and ideas were increasingly opened up to female participation.

Critical theory

Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th ce ...

argued that it is only in the private sphere that one can be one's authentic self, as opposed to the impersonal and identikit

They In Modern English, ''they'' is a third-person pronoun relating to a grammatical subject. Morphology In Standard Modern English, ''they'' has five distinct word forms: * ''they'': the nominative (subjective) form * ''them'': the accusat ...

of the public realm. Contrary to Heidegger, Hannah Arendt argued that (public)

action Action may refer to: * Action (narrative), a literary mode * Action fiction, a type of genre fiction * Action game, a genre of video game Film * Action film, a genre of film * ''Action'' (1921 film), a film by John Ford * ''Action'' (1980 fil ...

is the only way to manifest "who" somebody is, as opposed to describing "what" they are. She argued that only in public realm it is possible to fully express oneself.

Richard Sennett Richard Sennett (born 1 January 1943) is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalis ...

opposed what he saw as the Romantic idealization of the private realm of intimate relations, as opposed to the public sphere of action at a distance. Deleuze and Guattari saw postmodernism as challenging the traditional split between private and public spheres, producing instead the supersaturated space of immediate presence and media-scrutiny of

late capitalism Late capitalism, late-stage capitalism, or end-stage capitalism is a term first used in print by German economist Werner Sombart around the turn of the 20th century. In the late 2010s, the term began to be used in the United States and Canada t ...

.M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., ''The Jameson Reader'' (2000) pp. 329–30, 280

References

{{Reflist, 2}

Shifting boundaries

Gender politics

Critical theory

See also

References

Further reading