Private/Public Spheres

The Contours of the Spheres

The breadwinner-homemaker family model that has been referred to as the “traditional” family arrangement seems to reinforce not only the analytical relevance of considering public and private spheres but also its seemingly “natural” quality. Popular culture further finds traction in references to household chores as “womanly” and anything outdoors—beyond the threshold of the home and not related to fixing its physical structure—as “manly.” Thus, we often hear references to laundry, cooking, cleaning, caring for children, and vacuuming as “womanly work.” In contrast, mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway, fixing the roof, and painting the house clearly fall in the realm of the “manly.” Fixing the kitchen plumbing and configuring the VCR, though inside the house, also seem to clearly fall within the purview of the man, since they involve maintaining the physical structure and technology, both manly things. When it comes to making decisions such as what drapes, carpet, couch, or chandelier to purchase, the woman's perspective takes precedence, while deciding on what lawn mower or electronic devices to buy would be deferred to the man.

These conventions are by no means written in stone, and they can certainly vary considerably from family to family. However, as patterns, they are identifiable, and violation of such norms may create a sense that some form of transgression has occurred.

Beyond the immediate home, the spheres continue to hold sway. Men more often tend to pursue careers (with somewhere in the order of 1 percent serving as stay-at-home dads), and women tend to ensure that child caregiving is seen to as a first order of business (with close to 33 percent of all mothers with non-school-age children serving as stay-at-home moms). When families move for jobs, it is likely for the man's job, and when families choose which schools to send their children to, it is most likely the woman who has the last word. Hence, though such patterns may not be present or even preferred in one's own family, in popular culture, on balance, these patterns emerge as the contours of the public and private dichotomy.

A Problematic Distinction

While from a distance, the public/private dichotomy seems a logical, even natural analytical lens through which to examine families, authority, and social [Page 682]importance, on closer look this lens may be troubling. As early as Marx and Engels, theorists have noted the problem with the division between public and private aspects of families. Marx and Engels noted, upon studying the functions of modern capitalism, that the “public” work men do in factories to provide for their families would not be possible if not for women staying at home to tend to fundamental matters of survival, such as food, shelter, and reproduction. In other words, providing financially for the family may seem like a one-way exchange in which wives and children are dependent on male breadwinners. However, in reality, it is a two-way exchange, in which the entire economy depends on the necessary work of those in the private sphere to maintain the health and motivation of those who work in the public sphere. If shirts were not laundered and ironed and workers were not fed and tended to emotionally, the workforce would most likely fall apart. In this sense, work done in and around the home, traditionally by women, is far from “private.” Its implications are just as public as the work of those who leave the home to labor in other locations within the economy.

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