ABSTRACT
In her essay, “Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy,” Carol Pateman argues that “[t]he dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle; it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about” (118). Most political theorists see the origins of the public/private divide in the modern nationstate and industrial capitalism; men became citizens and workers in the public sphere and assumed authority over women and children in the private realm of the family. Thus, feminist theorists have traditionally understood the binary as key to women’s exclusion from citizenship and their subordination in the home. As Pateman argues, feminist theorists have challenged this gendered divide, as well as critiquing Marxist and liberal political theories of the modern nation-state that ignore gender. These feminist critiques have demonstrated that the public and private are mutually constitutive, that gender is a key organizing principle of the binary, and that the “personal is political.”
