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The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority and tradition, unhampered by interventions from governmental, economic or other institutions. Examples of the private sphere are high society, religion, sex, family and home.
In public-sphere theory, on the bourgeois model, the private sphere is that domain of one's life in which one works for oneself. In that domain, people work, exchange goods, and maintain their families; it is therefore, in that sense, separate from the rest of society.
In the classical world, economic life was the prerogative of the household,M. I Finley, The World of Odysseus (1967) p. 69 and p. 91 only matters which could not be dealt with by the household alone entered the public realm of the polis.J. O'Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (1972) pp. 22–3 In the modern world, the public economy permeates the home, providing the main access to the public sphere for the citizen become consumer.J. O'Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (1972) pp. 23–4
In classical times, crime and punishment was the concern of the kinship group, a concept only slowly challenged by ideas of public justice.R. Fagles trans. Aeschylus: The Oresteia (1977) pp. 21–2 Similarly in medieval Europe the blood feud only slowly gave way to legal control,G. O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of England (1967) pp. 109, 234 whereas in modern Europe only the Feud would still attempt to keep the avenging of violent crime within the private sphere.
Conversely, in early modern Europe, religion was a central public concern, essential to the maintenance of the state, so that details of private worship were hotly debated and controverted in the public sphere.J. H. Elliott, Europe Divided (1968) p. 93-5 Similarly, sexual behavior was subject to a generally agreed code publicly enforced by both formal and informal social control.F. Dabhoiwala, 'The First Sexual Revolution' The Oxford Historian X (2012) pp. 41–6 In postmodern society, both religion and sex are now generally seen as matters of private choice.
The private sphere was long regarded as women's "proper place" whereas men were supposed to inhabit the public sphere. (2025). 9781847204011, Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 9781847204011 Although feminist researchers such as V. Spike Peterson have discovered roots of the exclusion of women from the public sphere in ancient Athenian times, a distinct ideology that prescribed separate spheres for women and men emerged during the Industrial Revolution because of the severance of the workplace from places of residence that occurred with the build up of urban centres of work. Even writing was traditionally considered forbidden, as "In the anxious comments provoked by the 'female pen' it was easy enough to detect fear of the writing woman as a kind of castrating female whose grasp upon that instrument seems an arrogation of its generative power".
Feminists have challenged the ascription in a number of (not always commensurate) ways. In the first place, the slogan "the personal is political" attempted to open up the 'private' sphere of home and child-rearing to public scrutiny as well as call to attention how the exclusion of women from the public sphere makes the private sphere political.J. Childers/G. Hentzi ed., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) p. 252 At the same time, there was a new valorisation of the personal – of experiential knowledge and the world of the body – as against the (traditional) male preserves of public speech and theory.Mary Eagleton ed., Feminist Literary Criticism (1991) p. 6
All the while, due to the activism of feminists, the public sphere of work, business, politics and ideas were increasingly opened up to female participation.Susan Faludi, Stiffed (1999) pp. 9, 35
Contrary to Heidegger, Hannah Arendt argued that (public) action is the only way to manifest "who" somebody is, as opposed to describing "what" they are. She argued that only in public realm it is possible to fully express oneself. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958)
Richard Sennett opposed what he saw as the Romantic idealization of the private realm of intimate relations, as opposed to the public sphere of action at a distance.Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1976)
Deleuze and Guattari saw postmodernism as challenging the traditional split between private and public spheres, producing instead the supersaturated space of immediate presence and media-scrutiny of late capitalism.M. Hardt/K. Weeks eds., The Jameson Reader (2000) pp. 329–30, 280
Zizi A. Papacharissi, A Private Sphere (2013)
Alan F. Westin, Privacy and Freedom (1967)
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