Gendering of Public and Private Space

Gendering of public and private spaces refers to the superimposition of gender meanings on the distinction between public and private space. The meanings of the public/private distinction have changed over time and within various cultures, and the very publicness and privateness of places are conditional and contingent. In Western political thought, especially in those societies that have inherited the philosophical assumptions of the Enlightenment, institutions like the state, the market, workplaces, and, more generally, all spaces of discussion or implementation of government politics or of the principles of living together fall into the category of the public sphere; the household and the family, and more generally the realm of intimate relations, are considered as the private sphere. The two terms of this dichotomy have historically been identified with qualities attributed to men and women, respectively. The public domain [Page 641]is considered as the intrinsic domain for rationality, justice, objectivity, meritocracy, austerity, universalism, and competition, which have been traditionally considered as proper male qualities; the private domain has been identified as the site for irrationality, intimacy, emotions, sexuality, and particularistic attitudes, traditionally regarded as typically feminine. From another perspective, women have been socially constructed as naturally suited for the private sphere and unsuited for public activity, and men have been considered as public citizens par excellence: their role as fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers were not to be taken into public life.

The public/private dichotomy has been the justification for creating separated social spaces for men and women. This division has been further fueled in industrial capitalism and liberal economies, as the scale of manufacturing increased during the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe. The industrial production and distribution of goods could no longer be organized around a family life based on the shared work of wives and husbands (in artisans' shops, merchants' businesses, or agriculture) and was taken out of the household, in a world of public affairs apart from the domain now identified as “domestic.” This reorganization of labor, and the social and economic stratification and specialization that followed, pushed men and women into a gendered segregation of roles: men in the role of unique breadwinner devoted to the paid work and the public life; women in the role of main homemakers devoted to the managing of the household and child caring. Therefore, each of them was assigned to a distinct space, both material and symbolic. The bourgeois public sphere that emerged across Europe in various locations, including coffeehouses, literary salons, and philanthropic and professional associations, where people could gather and discuss matters of common concern, as in Jürgen Habermas's historical account, developed also through the exclusion of women (and lower strata of society) from both the public spaces and access to literacy. Economic production soon became formalized as a male-dominated labor market, and public institutions systematically excluded or oppressed women, often with legal interdictions. Access to economic and administrative institutions for women was mediated by male husbands, fathers, or brothers. Legal restrictions to public visibility or speaking, to suffrage, to autonomous commercial activities, and to property ownerships confirmed that public spaces were far from being inclusive. Spatial architectures themselves have served as expressions of women's distance from a male public and limited mobility. The phenomenological experience of the flaneur is extremely gendered as it was an opportunity effectively limited to men: the lack of female public lavatories and resting places in the streets during much of the nineteenth century in the name of middle-class decorum and women's static nature is evidence of the exclusive nature of modern public space.

...