Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Distinction

The liberal distinction between a public sphere of state authority, contract, and citizenship and a private sphere of family, household, and intimate life traces back at least to John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1689), which distinguishes "paternal power," exercised by parents over children within the family, from "political power," exercised by the state over citizens, and treats the marriage contract itself as a private agreement largely outside the scope of civil regulation. Feminist political theorists of the late twentieth century argued that this seemingly neutral division in fact concealed a substantive and long-standing legal and social subordination of women within the "private" sphere, a subordination that liberal political theory's very definition of its own proper subject matter placed conveniently beyond critical examination; because the classical liberal tradition, including in its Millian variant, generally treated the household as pre-political and consensual, forms of unfreedom occurring specifically within it, from coverture to marital rape, could be, and for centuries were, excluded from the scope of political and legal justice altogether.