This chapter builds on the feminist critiques of binary, either/or thought discussed in Chapter Four to examine the temporal implications of feminist challenges to political theory's conventional distinction between the public and the private. After outlining feminist arguments for those unfamiliar with them, it applies these to the time we spend as workers and citizens. Rejecting the mainstream view that women's traditional responsibilities are simply a negative constraint on their ability to participate as full members of society, it insists that these are highly valuable in their own right. It also draws on feminist theories of justice to argue that men's relative exemption from ‘private’ responsibilities is a key injustice that has negative consequences for society; it finds that a modified Marxist perspective can usefully inform discussion of this.

Feminist critiques of the public/private distinction

Mainstream Western political theory has generally held that democratic states have no business interfering in the private lives of citizens and that domestic arrangements are beyond the remit of political enquiry. In contrast, this book supports the feminist claim that the public and private spheres are conceptually and practically interdependent and that, by ignoring the private bases of women's disadvantages in the public sphere, the conventional distinction helps maintain them (from a wide literature, see Elshtain, 1981; Eisenstein, 1984; Pateman, 1987; Okin, 1990; Young, 1990; Phillips, 1991, 1993; Ackelsberg and Shanley, 1996; Landes, 1998; Lister, 2003; Zelizer, 2005).

At a conceptual level, the distinction is bound up with a distinction between history and nature that “constructs the private sphere as having a timelessness associated with nature and reproductive cyclical time, which supposedly disconnects it from politics” (Holmes, 2002, p 40). This makes it difficult to see that private gender relations are culturally and historically variable and therefore potentially open to change. The notion of a superior public sphere of rational discourse, justice and impartiality also presupposes and requires the existence of an inferior private sphere to which the ‘messiness’ of passion, emotion and partial concerns can be relegated.