Concluding discussion

Abstract

The recognition of the interacting and overlapping nature of the ‘public’ and ‘private’ has provided important insights for feminist understandings. We can see ways that the structuring by gender of people’s expectations and experience of their domestic, sexual and emotional worlds serves to constrain or enhance their employment circumstances, and vice versa. By charting the complex social and ideological mechanisms which shape taken for granted practices, and by understanding their political nature, we illuminate potential transformatory pathways. However, when we observe the realities of people’s everyday worlds we find diversity: for instance, women of African-Caribbean origins different gender self-concepts and experience. In many respects the discovery of diverse standpoints has undermined our theoretical confidence. Instead of drawing on these to illuminate and distinguish among the wide range of social mechanisms which interact to constrain or empower women, difference is often tacked on as an after-thought, at best, dealt with as a self contained case study. Thus the theoretical insights necessary for an integrated analysis remain unincorporated.1 In Women’s Studies courses, for example, specific time is usually set aside to explore lesbian experience with specialized reading to guide discussion.