scholarly journals Women Judges, Private Lives: (In)visibilities in Fact and Fiction

2017 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Thornton ◽  
Heather Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Women Judges ◽  
The Public ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
The Public Sphere

Throughout the Western intellectual tradition, the separation of public and private life has been ubiquitous.[footnote* See, eg, Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (eds), Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy (University of Chicago Press, 1997); Margaret Thornton (ed), Public and Private: Feminist Legal Debates (Oxford University Press, 1995); Ruth Gavison, ‘Feminism and the Public/Private Distinction’ (1992) 45 Stanford Law Review 1; S I Benn and G F Gaus (eds), Public and Private in Social Life (Croom Helm, 1983); Frances E Olsen, ‘The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform’ (1983) 96 Harvard Law Review 1497.] Although the line of demarcation changes according to time and circumstance, the conjunction of the public sphere with the masculine and the private sphere with the feminine has remained a constant in political thought.

Attitudes and the Stalled Gender Revolution: Egalitarianism, Traditionalism, and Ambivalence from 1977 through 2016

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Scarborough ◽  
Ray Sin ◽  
Barbara Risman
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Latent Class ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
General Social Survey ◽  
Gender Attitudes ◽  
Birth Cohorts ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Empirical studies show that though there is more room for improvement, much progress has been made toward gender equality since the second wave of feminism. Evidence also suggests that women’s advancements have been more dramatic in the public sphere of work and politics than in the private sphere of family life. We argue that this lopsided gender progress may be traced to uneven changes in gender attitudes. Using data from more than 27,000 respondents who participated in the General Social Survey from 1977 through 2016, we show that gender attitudes have more than one underlying dimension and that these dimensions have changed at different rates over time. Using latent class analysis, we find that the distribution of respondents’ attitudes toward gender equality has changed over the past 40 years. There has been an increase in the number of egalitarians who support equality in public and private spheres, while the traditionals who historically opposed equality in both domains have been replaced by ambivalents who feel differently about gender equality in the public and private spheres. Meanwhile, successive birth cohorts are becoming more egalitarian, with Generation-Xers and Millennials being the most likely to hold strong egalitarian views. The feminist revolution has succeeded in promoting egalitarian views and decreasing the influence of gender traditionalism, but has yet to convince a substantial minority that gender equality should extend to both public and private spheres of social life

The Portable Home: The Domestication of Public Space

2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 324-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krishan Kumar ◽  
Ekaterina Makarova
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Public Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Privileged Site

Much commentary indicates that, starting from the 19th century, the home has become the privileged site of private life. In doing so it has established an increasingly rigid separation between the private and public spheres. This article does not disagree with this basic conviction. But we argue that, in more recent times, there has been a further development, in that the private life of the home has been carried into the public sphere—what we call “the domestication of public space.” This has led to a further attenuation of public life, especially as regards sociability. It has also increased the perception that what is required is a better “balance” between public and private. We argue that this misconstrues the nature of the relation of public to private in those periods that attained the greatest degree of sociability, and that not “balance” but “reciprocity” is the desired condition.

The Public Sphere

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 607-611 ◽  
Author(s):  
Klaus Eder
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Self ◽  
Social Bond ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Do So

The article situates the issue of the public sphere as a phenomenon that is historically bound and culturally specific. According to this point of view, the Western practices and the Western way of thinking about the public sphere appear as a historically particular way of dealing with the more general phenomenon which is the creation of a social bond beyond the family. Looking at the self-contradictory effects of the ‘modern’ Western public sphere, the question is asked whether the public association of self-interested or self-governing individuals might have to be theorized as a partial and insufficient solution to the social bond. A comparative perspective shows that it is not individuals but cultural forms that link people in the public sphere. They do so by providing a narrative basis of discourses and/or markets that in the self-understanding of modernity shape social life.

Secularism, Nationalism, and Minorities in Turkey

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 301-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ina Merdjanova
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Justice And Development Party ◽  
Four Books ◽  
The Public Sphere

The vivid interest in the philosophical and legal premises of secularism in Turkey, as well as in its workings in the public and private life of Turkish citizens resonates with an ongoing questioning in Western academia of the validity of established theories of secularization. More importantly, the political and social transformations in Turkey itself, and the growing role and visibility of Islam in the public sphere, especially during the last decade marked by the rule of the Islamic-oriented Justice and Development Party (jdp), have triggered a search for new explanatory frameworks and reconceptualization of Turkish secularism.The four books discussed in this article tackle the interrelated issues of secularism, nationalism and minorities in Turkey from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

The Limits of Confidentiality and of the Right to Privacy

2018 ◽  
pp. 155-173
Author(s):  
Elena Unguru
Keyword(s):  
Social Work ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Right To Privacy ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Right To Information ◽  
The Right

Social work acts at within the public and private fields. From an ethical point of view, the first one is governed by the society's right to information and the social worker's obligation for transparency. The second one is the beneficiary's right to private life and the social worker's obligation of confidentiality. The two sets of competing rights and obligations define the dual nature of social work to act both in the public sphere, as well as the private one. Starting from the case of Tarasoff, the American instances stated that the obligation of the therapist to protect the possible victims is a priority to that of confidentiality. The current chapter follows the meaning of this obligation in the practice of social work, as well as the clarification of the importance and limits of applicability of the principle of confidentiality in social work.

scholarly journals The Dichotomy of Public/Private in the New Media Space

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 441
Author(s):  
Alla V. Drozdova
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Internet Portals ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Networked Public Sphere

Today we exist in a situation in which the new media environment has resulted in paradigm shift in our conception of reality, altering public spaces and communities, as well as functional modes and mechanisms of the private sphere, through the creation of new digitally-intermediated methods of communication. In a mediatised culture, the boundaries between public and private have been fundamentally transformed. Multi-screening has created a new mode of visibility for social cultures and subcultures, which, if it does not exactly abolish the boundary between private and public, at least allows us to rethink this dichotomy. Having thus established a new mode of visibility, the advent of new media has led to the sphere of private life being absorbed by the public sphere, in the process not only of facilitating discussion, but also in becoming a means by which control is exerted by the state, the market and advertising. In turn, in coming under the domination of specific private or group interests, the public sphere itself has been transformed. While, in coinciding with the interests of other groups, these interests may achieve temporary commonality, they cannot be truly public in the original universal sense. The use of multiple Internet portals in living reality creates a distinct or alternative level of virtual publicity. No longer requiring the usual physical spaces to regulate his or her inclusion in both virtual and traditional public spheres, a user of contemporary gadgets creates a remote and individually-tailored model of public interaction. This process of virtual individualisation indicates the ambivalent nature of the networked public sphere. While, on the one hand, in engaging in collective interaction and concern for common affairs, politically-active people need the presence of others, on the other, the fact of being rooted in their own experience results in the creation of burgeoning personalised and fragmented hierarchies.

Republicanism, Freedom from Domination, and the Cambridge Contextual Historians

2001 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 851-876 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Springborg
Keyword(s):  
Roman Law ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Philip Pettit ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Set Up

Philip Pettit, in Republicanism: a Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), draws on the historiography of classical republicanism developed by the Cambridge Contextual Historians, John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, to set up a programme for the recovery of the Roman Republican notion of freedom, as freedom from domination. But it is my purpose to show that classical republicanism, as a theory of institutional complexity and balanced government, could not, and did not, lay exclusive claim to freedom from domination as a defining value. Positive freedom was a concept ubiquitous in Roman Law and promulgated in Natural Law as a universal human right. And it was just the ubiquitousness of this right to freedom, honoured more often in the breach than the observance, which prompted the scorn of early modern proto-feminists like Mary Astell and her contemporary, Judith Drake. The division of society into public and private spheres, which liberalism entrenched, precisely allowed democrats in the public sphere full rein as tyrants in the domestic sphere of the family, as these women were perspicacious enough to observe. When republicanism is defined in exclusively normative terms the rich institutional contextualism drops away, leaving no room for the issues it was designed to address: the problematic relation between values and institutions that lies at the heart of individual freedoms.

scholarly journals Zveřejnit či nechat skryté: Jak čtenáři Blesku zdůvodňují politickou relevanci informací o soukromí politiků

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-74
Author(s):  
Martin Volek
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Private Life ◽  
Public Office ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
The Media ◽  
Public Scrutiny ◽  
The Right ◽  
High Level

Politicians as public persons are under increasing review by both the media and the general public. This review focuses not only on acts in public office, both official and unofficial, but also on the behavior of politicians in private life that could, in a real or imagined way, influence their performance in public office. This paper presents the perceptions of the boundaries between the public and private lives of politicians by readers of the most popular Czech tabloid, Blesk. The qualitative analysis based on in-depth interviews and a focus group with readers presents arguments that readers use to categorize information about politicians into that that belongs in the public domain and should be therefore published, and that that belongs to the private sphere and should not be published. In the readers’ views, citizens have the right to know about a politician’s private life, such as information that reflects a politician’s character and about possible influences from their private life on their performance in public office. The readers also consider how it feels for a politician to be a private person in public office under public scrutiny. These readers then often advocate the right of a politician to have his privacy respected, since these readers themselves would not be pleased to be under such a high level of public scrutiny regarding their own lives. It seems that the readers’ arguments are largely based on their personal history. We finally suggest that research on political participation would be enriched by including the perspective of everyday life experiences of the general public.

Private Women and the Public Realm

1994 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy C. Davis
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Century Model ◽  
Theatre History ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
State Domination

Following the translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere into English in 1989, we have come to see “the public” and “the private” as historically contingent categories bearing upon nests of social practices. The public and private are not just distinctions of geography—so that beyond our front doors we are necessarily and unavoidably in the public—for they bear on authority, authorized voice, citizenship, and credibility in democratic societies. Whereas the Hellenic Greek social order recognized freedom only in the public realm, and only embodied by household masters, the nineteenth-century model of separate spheres cast the public realm as the place where individuals defended the family (equated to the private) from state domination while debating the proper roles for the sexes. Unacknowledged in both models is that agents of the state and the private individuals who have access to the public realm are normalized as exclusively male and of the hegemonic class. The Greek and Victorian models—explicitly relegating women to the home (private) and men to the marketplace (public)—are equally open to critique for being as class-blind as they are hyperbolically universalizing of all cultures and sub-cultures, as if they obeyed a natural law instead of ideological preferences. If we write theatre history with either model in mind and assume that “the public” does not carry with it connotations of power, then we are distorting the evidence and misfiring on our interpretations.

The public and the private: reconfiguring the interrelationship during a civil act

2019 ◽  
pp. 53-69
Author(s):  
Natalia Kostenko
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Online Communication ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Physical Interaction ◽  
Bare Life ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

The subject matter of research interest here is the movement of sociological reflection concerning the interplay of public and private realms in social, political and individual life. The focus is on the boundary constructs embodying publicity, which are, first of all, classical models of the space of appearance for free citizens of the polis (H. Arendt) and the public sphere organised by communicative rationality (Ju. Habermas). Alternative patterns are present in modern ideas pertaining to the significance of biological component in public space in the context of biopolitics (M. Foucault), “inclusive exclusion of bare life” (G. Agamben), as well as performativity of corporeal and linguistic experience related to the right to participate in civil acts such as popular assembly (J. Butler), where the established distinctions between the public and the private are levelled, and the interrelationship of these two realms becomes reconfigured. Once the new media have come into play, both the structure and nature of the public sphere becomes modified. What assumes a decisive role is people’s physical interaction with online communication gadgets, which instantly connect information networks along various trajectories. However, the rapid development of information technology produces particular risks related to the control of communications industry, leaving both public and private realms unprotected and deforming them. This also urges us to rethink the issue of congruence of the two ideas such as transparency of societies and security.

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