Women’s Experience of the City: Revising the Public/Private Distinction Within Feminist Geography

Abstract

The way of construing the public and the private sets up the social, economic, and political groundwork for gender inequality in everyday life. That distinction has always been a geographic and fundamentally feminist matter. The article examines women’s experience of the city by combining two optics — a structural political and economic analysis with a feminist sensitivity to the arrangement of everyday life — while at the same time trying to deconstruct the dichotomy itself. Where exactly the boundary falls is of less consequence than understanding how the private is generated, how it is defined, constructed and regulated by the public; but it is also important to assess what emancipatory potential the private can offer in the current post-Fordist and post-socialist neoliberal context, which blurs such other binaries as production/reproduction and home/work. The article opens by recounting the history of the separation between the private and public as well as the discussions that it prompted and the criticism of those discussions. The historical moment when the private/public dichotomy was formed is then outlined with emphasis on the critique of ideas about the public, the private and the commons. In conclusion, the usefulness of the dichotomy is called into question by engaging with the alternatives developed by Black feminists (Black geographies), by theorists and practitioners of transnational feminism, with a focus on the everyday life, all of which open up new prospects for studying the dynamics of the private/public continuum. The article ultimately arrives at some conclusions on how the public and private should be examined today.