Dr.

Gözde Yirmibeşoğlu
Öğretim Görevlisi, ODTÜ YDYO
Tel: 0532 3847899
E-mail: gozdey@metu.edu.tr

Abstract

1
Many feminists have been arguing that women are kept out of politics due to a great
number of powerful beliefs and practices that distinguish sharply between public and
private. Their proposal is to wipe out the gendered characteristic of the distinction
between the two spheres. At that point, participation in political life emerges as a
problem since feminists propose that both should be equally involved in political life.
Their argument is that the secondary role of women in the political arena or even their
exclusion was perpetuated by the modern thinkers. Early political theorists developed a
variety of arguments to justify their male-stream theory, so, now, many feminists see
sexual inequality and sex segregation as something built into the original foundations of
classical thought and they claim that the segregation remained persistent in modernity.
The issue discussed in this study is the relationship between modernity and feminist
perspectives stating that it is not accidental that women were so long expelled from the
public sphere. Furthermore, the approach of modernity is criticized by underlining the
stress on the liberal individual who is male.

Özet

Çok sayıda feminist, kadınların politika dışında kalmalarının sebebinin kamusal ve özel
alan ayrımını keskin bir şekilde yapan önemli ölçüde güçlü inançlar ve uygulamalar
olduğunu belirtmektedirler. Onlar bu iki alandaki cinsiyete dayalı ayrımın silinip yok
edilmesini savunurlar. Bu noktada politik yaşama katılma bir problem olarak ortaya
çıkar çünkü feministler her iki cinsin de politikaya katılımının eşit olmasının altını
çizmektedirler. Onlara göre kadının politik alandaki ikincil rolü ve hatta dışlanması
modern düşünürler tarafından vurgulanmıştır. İlk siyaset kuramcıları erkeği ön plana
çıkaran kuramlarını haklı göstermek için çeşitli görüşler geliştirmişlerdir. Dolayısıyla,
günümüzde feministler cinsiyete dayalı ayrımcılığın klasik düşüncenin temelinde
yattığına ve modern düşünce ile sürekli vurgulandığına inanmaktadırlar. Bu çalışmada
tartışılan konu modernite ve feminist bakışaçısı arasındaki ilişkidir ve kadının kamusal
alandan atılmasının nedeninin tesadüfi olmadığını savunur. Ayrıca, liberal bireyin
erkek olduğunu vurglayan modernite yaklaşımı da eleştirilmektedir.

Key words: women, individual, classical thought, modernity

Modernity and Women

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 Gözde YİRMİBEŞOĞLU

Introduction

During the medieval church state, there was not one body of men who formed the state
but there was only a Christian society and it covered the whole world. The society had
two administrators under God, the pope and the emperor (Wootton, 1986: 97). Later,
with the tradition of Augustine, Europe saw for the first time something unique in the
history of the world: a secular power into the service of divine truth (Porter, 1989: 142-
145). During the twelfth and thirteenth century a new scholarly activity depending on
institutions, the new universities such as Paris and Oxford, prepared an amazingly
active intellectual life. They attracted great numbers of students who studied
systematically sciences, philosophy and theology. They were the agencies through
which the new enlightenment spread. The works of Aristotle, which had not been
known at all in the earlier Middle Ages, began to be known early in the thirteenth
century. Conception framed by Aristotle concerning the city-state had no literal
application to medieval society but its revision could be useful for the purposes of the
period (McClelland, 1996: 65). In the thirteenth century, the main attention of the new
scholarship was given rather to theology and metaphysics than to political theory. The
writing of political treatises was much more frequent in the fourteenth century.

After the fifteenth century, there was a tremendous growth of monarchical power in
almost every part of Western Europe (Germino, 1972: 57). There was great change
both in government and in ideas about government. Political power, which had been
largely dispersed among feudatories and corporations was rapidly gathered into the
hands of the king, who was the main beneficiary of increasing national unity. The
conception of a sovereign, who is the head of all political power, was strong in the
sixteenth century as a common form of political thought.

By the early years of the sixteenth century, therefore, absolute monarchy had become
the prevailing type of government in the Western Europe. Absolute monarchy
overturned feudal constitutionalism and the free city-states, on which medieval
civilization had largely depended. Ecclesiastical rulers were everywhere subjected to

3
more and more royal control, and finally, the church's legal authority disappeared
(Jones, 2002: 2-3). The growth of absolute monarchy, like that of the feudal
constitutional monarchy, took place in almost every part of Western Europe.

The opening decades of the seventeenth century began with a moderate process of
releasing political philosophy from the association with theology which had been
characteristic of its earlier history throughout the Christian era. As a result of a political
theory based on natural law, two necessary elements are necessary to be underlined: the
contract by which a society or a government came into being and the state of nature
which existed apart from the contract (Schochet, 1990: 59). The relations of private
individuals to one another and the relations between sovereign states were the two
important cases. The idea of a government depending upon a pact between the ruler and
people was much older than the modern theories of natural law. In the older
conception, the people or the community figured as a corporate body (Gunn, 1983:
267). As the theory of natural law was developed, the capacity of people to contract
needed explanation. There were two contracts, one by which the community itself was
produced and bound its members to one another and one between the community
formed and its governing officials. The idea of contract was made into a universal
theory covering all forms of obligation and all forms of social grouping. English
writers did not develop the theory. Hobbes curbed the contract of government for his
own purposes and Locke used both forms of contract without taking the trouble to
distinguish them clearly (Gingell, Little, and Winch, 2000: 66-69) (Sommerville, 1992:
57-58).

Modernity after the Seventeenth Century

Modern agencies form and reform, produce and reproduce, incorporate and
reincorporate, industrialize and reindustrialize. In modernity, modernization is always
under way. The ambiguous legacy of the term 'modern' supports the perpetual process
of self-critique and absorption. William Connolly declares modernity as an epoch in
which a set of contending understandings of self, responsibility, knowledge, rationality,
nature, freedom and legitimacy have established sufficient presence to shuffle other
possible perspectives out of active consideration (Connolly, 1988: 3). Individualism
and community, realism and idealism, the public interest and the common good,
technocracy and humanism, positive and negative freedom, utility and rights,

4
empiricism and rationalism, liberalism and collectivism, capitalism and socialism,
democracy and totalitarianism, all grow up together within the confines of modernity.
To comprehend modernity, points of contrast and comparison of some generality are
needed. In this study, medieval society and the ancient world are the vital contrasts.

Liberalism emerged out of an empiricist philosophy which took experience as the

source of all knowledge and abandoned previous beliefs in innate ideas. This was
exciting for the natural sciences but it had dubious effect for political theorists. The
individual was on the stage as the source of all knowledge. Modern philosophy was
solidly and definitely related to individual human nature. The individual human being,
with his interests, his enterprise, his desire for happiness and advancement and with his
reason, which seemed the condition for a successful use of all his other faculties,
appeared to be the foundation on which a stable society must be built. Man as a priest,
as a soldier or as a member of an estate did not matter but man as a bare human being,
a man with no master appeared to be the solid fact.

There was the discovery of an unchangeable core in human nature. Therefore, there
must surely be some minimal conditions required to make possible man's stable
combination in social groups. For the theories of natural law, especially after Hobbes, it
was membership that required explanation. Society is made for man, not man for
society. The individual is both logically and ethically prior. For Hobbes the laws of
nature meant a set of rules according to which an ideally reasonable being would
pursue his own advantage (Bobbio, 1993: 153-155). If he were perfectly conscious of
all circumstances in which he was acting and was quite aware of momentary impulse
and prejudice, man would act rationally. Since all human behavior is motivated by
individual self-interest, society must be regarded merely as a means to this end
(Conolly, 1988:30-31).

In Hobbes, the power of the state and the authority of the law are justified only because
they contribute to the security of individual human beings. Social well-being as such
disappears entirely and is replaced by a sum of separate self-interests. Society is merely
an artificial body, a collective term for the fact that human beings find it individually
advantageous to exchange goods and services. It is this individualism which makes
Hobbes's philosophy the most revolutionary theory of the age.

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When Hobbes's modernity is discussed, the question to be raised is the meaning of
church and God for him. For him, church is merely a corporation. Like any corporation
it must have a head and this is the sovereign. It is a company of men united in the
person of one sovereign. Hobbes holds that it is the duty of the church to teach but he
adds that no teaching is lawful unless the sovereign authorizes it (Hampton, 1986: 98).

Hobbes's political thought conforms to the realm of scholarship or science. Although it

seems to intend to influence the course of events in favor of the royalists, it had little or
no effect of that kind. It contributed in the long run to a more radical liberalism than
any that was within the bounds of practical politics in the seventeenth century as a
solvent of traditional loyalties and a presentation of enlightened egoism. The
dissolution of traditional institutions and the economic pressure were facts not theories.

The belief that social and political institutions are justified only because they protect
individual interests and maintain individual rights emerged under the pressure of
circumstances of the seventeenth century and it became more effective during the two
following centuries. As stated by Flathman, Hobbes held that we must make or devise
for ourselves our principes and laws, our rules of justice and injustice, our obligations
and rights. As with other 'modern' natural law thinkers, he believed that we can
accomplish this devising with sufficient certitude to warrant the strongly imperatival
languages of law and justice, obligation and duty, right and rights (Flathman, 1993:
53).

Religion was not a matter of vital moment in Hobbes's experience. He attributed less
moral weight to it than Machiavelli. The desire for freedom of conscience, like the
desire for political freedom, seems to have figured in his mind merely as an evidence of
intellectual confusion. At the same time ecclesiastical questions, which constitute
nearly half of Leviathan, still bulked very large in his political outlook (Taylor, 1988:
32).

In his individualism, there are individuals who desire to live and to enjoy protection for
the means of life. The advantages of a government are substantial and they must be
gathered in individuals in the form of peace, and comfort and security of person and
property. This is the only ground upon which government can be justified or even exist.
A general or public good, like a public will is an idol of the imagination.

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This individualism is the definitely modern element in Hobbes and for the two
centuries after him, self-interest seemed to most thinkers an obvious motive. The
absolute power of the sovereign, a theory with which Hobbes's name is more generally
associated, was really the necessary complement of his individualism. These
tendencies, like the increase of legal power and the recognition of self-interest as the
dominant motive in life, have been among the most pervasive in modern times.

English Thought must have moved rapidly between 1650 and the end of the century.
When Locke wrote forty years later, he could assume far more actual separation of
political and religious questions than Hobbes ever imagined (Grant, 1987: 184-187).
John Locke as a young man had hoped for a policy of comprehension in the English
church itself, and when his hope was defeated, he turned to a theory of almost universal
toleration and of practical separation between church and state. The whole intellectual
mood of Locke was secular to a degree that would have been impossible during the
time of Hobbes. He met the theological dispute with a deadliest weapon, indifference.
He was profoundly reasonable and anti-dogmatic.

Although Locke was not directly criticizing Hobbes, he attached some ideas such as the
theory that the state of nature is a war of all against all. Locke held that the state of
nature is peace, good will, mutual assistance and preservation (Harris, 1994: 272-273) .
He held that moral rights and duties are intrinsic and prior to law and governments are
obligated to give effect by their law to what is naturally and morally right. For him,
property is a right which each individual brings to society in his own person, just as he
brings the physical energy of his body (Macpherson, 1980: 21).

Locke drew a different picture of the state of nature (Snyder, 1986: 213-215). The war
of all against all seemed to his common sense to be overdrawn, but like Hobbes he said
that society exists to protect property and other private rights which society does not
create (Sereenivasan, 1995: 10). As a result, his theory of mind was fundamentally
egoistic in its explanation of human behavior. It seems strange to notice an undesigned
cooperation both men stuck on social theory, the presumption that individual self-
interest is clear and impressive.

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Locke's political philosophy was an effort to combine past and present and also to find
a nucleus of agreement for reasonable men. Since he combined many elements from the
past, in the century following him, diverse theories emerged from his political
philosophy (Simmons, 1992: 353-354). His sincerity, his profound moral conviction,
his genuine belief in liberty, in human rights and in the dignity of human nature, united
with his moderation and good sense, made him the ideal spokesman of a middle-class
revolution.

In France, the criticism of Louis XIV government which began at the end of the
seventeenth century was not at first the product of any political philosophy but merely
the reaction of conscientious men to the shocking effects of a bad government.
Criticism of the absolute monarchy urgently needed a philosophy. In the seventeenth
century French philosophy had been relatively self-contained but in the eighteenth, it
was deliberately supplanted by the philosophy of Locke. A political philosophy like
Rousseau's began by the denial of rational self-interest which was not a reputable
motive. Rousseau supposed that the moral virtues exist in the greatest purity among the
common people. Rousseau's general will represented a unique fact about a community,
which is a collective good which is not the same thing as the private interests of its
members. The rights of individuals, such as liberty, equality and property which natural
law attributed to men as such, are really the rights of citizens. Men become equal, as
Rousseau says, 'by convention and legal rights', not as Hobbes had said, because their
physical power is substantially equal (Malness, 1993: 55).

Timothy Luke argues in Social Theory and Modernity that Rousseau is a systematic,
dialectical and antibourgeois social critic. Many of the social problems and cultural
crises that Rousseau assailed in his political and social theory continue to plague society
today (Luke, 1989: 120). Moreover, Rousseau's arguments can be of great value in
understanding the powerlessness and inequalities characteristic of modern life.

For Rousseau, the blessed state of nature was the state before all law and before all
knowledge of good or evil. The man of nature was happy and good because he was
ignorant of any morality and followed only his brute instincts. In the Social Contract,
he says only the passage from the state of nature to the civil state transformed man
from a dim-witted beast, subject exclusively to his appetites, into a being capable of
reason and of distinguishing between the just and the unjust. What constitutes

8
Rousseau's 'modernity', what separates him radically from any tradition of the
moralists, is that he sees the origin of evil not in the soul of man but in society, namely,
in others. His fundamental thesis could be formulated as follows: Man would be good,
ignorant, and happy if he were permitted to be alone, and far from his fellows. Man is
good by nature, but the society of men does not permit him to be good.

As Herbert Lüthy stresses, the slogans of modern concern appear for the first time in
recognizable terms in Rousseau's work, from alienation to depersonalization, and from
the uprootedness of socialized man to the formerly fashionable antithesis between soul
and intellect, between the organic and the ready-made, between culture and civilization,
between people and mass (Lüthy, 1970: 258).

Classical liberalism was founded on the doctrine of individual freedom. Defense of the
basic freedoms necessarily required clear limits on their restrictions by the state.
Individual freedoms are translated into individual rights which the state is bound to
administrate and uphold. The most fundamental right is the right to privacy and the
public becomes necessary to secure the private. The classic distinction between public
and private is the one between the public world of politics and the private world of
economic and familial relationships.

Within this broad evaluation of modernity, where was the women situated?
Unfortunately, it was not in a prospectively promising place. In fact, she was located
persistently out of the public sphere. Barbara Marshall underlines the negative
influence of the writers of modernity on women by arguing that 'there is no question
that the individual of liberalism was male; women were excluded from the public in
both its political and economic senses, being subsumed under the authority of their
husband and fathers' (Marshal, 1994: 10-11). Women could neither own property nor
sign contracts in their own right, and neither was the bulk of their labor undertaken in
terms of a labor contract. The marriage contract provided their only articulation as
individuals to the public realm. In classical liberal theory, the positioning of the
individual as prior to and partially outside of society is the reason for the exclusion of
women from society.

Joan Landes stresses the dramatic exclusion of women from the full rights of
citizenship, which arrested the movement toward gender equality during the French

9
Revolution. She also adds that the paradox of the gendered determination of modern
democratic sovereignty and republican freedom is nowhere more dramatically played
out during the eighteenth century than in the popular revolution in France (Landes,
1996: 295).

Feminist Critiques on Individualism

Sheldon Wolin describes liberalism as 'a philosophy of sobriety, born with fear,
nourished by disenchantment, and prone to believe that the human condition was likely
to remain one of pain and anxiety' (Wolin, 1960: 293-294). Benjamin Barber sums up
the liberal psychology as one in which 'we are born into the world solitary strangers,
live our lives as wary aliens, and die in fearful isolation' (Barber, 1984: 68). It may be
possible to claim that the individuals of the classic tradition were in desperate need of
protection due to their private needs and interests and the threatening image of the
others. Thomas Hobbes saw only one possible solution which was a regime of absolute
power.

The emphasis on the individual has usually been one of the points of departure for
those who criticize the liberal tradition. According to Zillah Eisenstein, the dilemma
rests on the abstractions of the individual. The male has been the reference point in all
the phallocratic discourses, with the supposedly gender-free language of individuals. As
Carole Pateman 1
argues, 'the individual is a man, in a man's body' (Eisenstein, 1989:
77). The discussions of sexual equality have always silently privileged this male body.
When men and women are treated the same, it means women are treated as if they were
men. When men and women are treated differently, the man is the norm, against which
woman is peculiar, lacking and different. Feminism has been endlessly locked into this
equality/difference dichotomy.

The alternative offered by Zillah Eisenstein is to 'pluralize the meaning of difference

and reinvent the category of equality' (Eisenstein, 1989: 4). Instead of the difference
between male and female, she suggests the recognition of the many differences between
women, between men, as well as between the two sexes. She argues that what we need

1
Carole Pateman is a specialist in political theory. She has been active in the discipline of Political
Science. Her main research has covered three broad areas: democratic theory, theories of original
contracts and feminist political theory. (from Pateman’s personal web page
www.polisci.ucla.edu/menu/people/faculty/carole.pateman.php)

10
is a 'radical sex/gender pluralism that will reconstitute the meaning of equality
(Eisenstein, 1989: 199).

Nancy Fraser examines the needs of women and underlines the prominent role of needs
talk. She discussed the difference between needs and rights and she aligns herself with
those who favor translating justified needs claims into social rights. She stresses that
feminists will have to operate on a terrain where needs talk is the discursive coin of the
realm (Fraser 1989: 182-183).

The genealogy of Carole Pateman centers on Hobbes, the social contractarian.

According to Christine Sylvester, Pateman suggests that Hobbes's route of escape from
a mythical state of nature, which was anarchical and warlike, in part required the
subordination of women in collective units, captained by men, that occasionally warred
against other similar units (Sylvester, 1998: 47-51). Women in the state of nature were
as strong and ingenious as men, but the mother rights to children that Hobbes granted
to women weighed them down during periods of war. Having to defend children and
themselves, women tended to be conquered by men. The conquering man, his
confederates and conquered women made a family which consisted of a man, and his
children, and servants together. The father or master is the sovereign of the family.

Only free-standing, unconquered men negotiated the social contract for other free-
standing men. Since women did not stand free, they were partly left behind in the state
of nature. Women were also partly brought under men's formal control by civic
contract of marriage, which was made possible by the contracting logic of the social
contract. Women consented to become wives under the domain of their husbands. This
sexual contract based on male-female relations in the state of nature and which was the
only logical option for non-free-standing women, made for a troubled relationship of
women to citizenship.

The citizen's regard for himself follows from his participation in sovereignty. The
identity of men becomes fused with the identity of the conquering, or naturally entitled,
authority of the state. This fusion has an interpretation in Hobbes' implicit imaginary of
women and children. The citizen and state are free that can defend itself and gain the
recognition of others and shore up an acknowledged identity as the sovereign state.

11
L'état c'est moi becomes l'état c'est les citoyens and the citoyens with the fullest rights
are men 2.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau gives a different origin of gender place that focuses on women
and the household. Rousseau assigns a natural place for women in marriage and family.
According to him, the family is the oldest of all societies and the only natural one. In
Rousseau, women became more sedentary and grew accustomed to looking after the
domestic responsibilities and children, while men went in quest of the common
subsistence.

In Emile, Rousseau underlines the social construction of gender (Trachtenberg, 1993:

155). According to Rousseau, the morality of women is grounded in the irrational
uterus and its unlimited sexual needs that refuse sublimation. Men's morality, on the
other hand, is grounded in the mind, in the reason, things that civilization helps develop
in him to augment his physical strength. Because woman is on the border of socially
contracted civilization, and because her sex difference drives her to disorderly
behavior, he says that women must be subjected either to a man or to the judgments of
men. Women must strive to please men, to be useful to them, to be loved and honored
by them. They have to pass on to sons virtues of citizenship and to daughters the virtues
of subordination. It is possible to say that there is connection between the stories of
Hobbes and Rousseau.

Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman explore the relation between individualism and
social contract by discussing the arguments of Hobbes and Locke (Brennan and
Pateman, 1998: 95). They pose the question why should the contract theorists have
argued that individuals were born free and equal and why in their theories do they
inhabit the state of nature. Their answer is that the social contract theory was part and
parcel of the emergence of the capitalist, market economy, and the liberal,
constitutional state and of the emergence of liberal society. Individuals cannot be seen
freely entering contracts and making exchanges with each other in the market. They
cannot freely pursue their interests unless they have come to be conceived as free and
equal to each other. Otherwise, there is no need voluntarily to agree to or consent to,

2
L’état c’est moi –I am the State- is attributed to the French King, Louis XIV, who worked
successfully to create a centralized state in the seventeenth century governed from the capital in order
to sweep away the fragmented feudalism which had hitherto persisted in France, thus giving rise to a
modern state. (website, wikipedia)

12
government or the exercise of authority. According to these two writers, the contract
theorists used the device of the state of nature to show that individuals were justified in
consenting to government. However, to be seen as free and equal by nature, individuals
must to some degree be seen in isolation from or as separate from other individuals.

When we examine the individual of liberalism, logically we have a question in mind:

why a liberal theorist should exclude females from the category of individual or why in
practice, and in most liberal political theory, for more than three centuries the free and
equal individual has been male? According to some writers like Sir Robert Filmer, God
gave Adam, the first father, absolute monarchical power by virtue of his procreative
powers, and this power passed to his male heirs. All political authority is absolute and
monarchical, and the power of kings is identical to that of fathers and vice versa.
However, fathers are husbands at the same time. Filmer also argued in 'Patriarcha' that
God gave kingly power to Adam over Eve who was made naturally fit for
subordination, to be ruled by her husband (Filmer, 1991: 68). This aspect of
patriarchalism is generally ignored, although the status of wives and mothers within the
family remains as an unsolved problem at the heart of liberal theory which gives an
obscure and shadowy figure to the mother.

Feminist Critiques on Public Private Distinction

The other issue which has been criticized in general and by the feminists is the precise
separation liberals make between public and private spheres. Many feminists have been
arguing that women are kept out of politics by a huge number of powerful beliefs and
practices that distinguish sharply between public and private. Their future proposal is to
eradicate the gendered characteristic of the distinction between public and private
spheres. They believe that women and men can equally share bringing up children,
doing domestic tasks and caring for the elderly of the family, so both would be
involved in political life. As a result, human beings can participate as equals in deciding
and reaching their own goals.

Despite an increasing importance of feminist critique, political thought has remained

indifferent to the new demands resulting from them. Since the ancient Greeks, issues
such as equality and rights have been discussed. Although the association between

13
equality and democracy is a recent matter, the ancient Greeks could imagine democracy
by not excluding women and slaves but equally including women and men into the
political arena. The similar trend is possible to be observed in the early liberals. The
debates of the political thought are not concerned with women who were ignored
during the outcries for freedom and equality. Early political theorists developed a
variety of arguments to justify their male-stream theory, so, now, many feminists see
sexual inequality and sex segregation as something built into the original foundations of
classical thought (Young, 1997: 20-21). According to some feminist writers such as
Carole Pateman, Iris Marion Young and Anne Phillips, classical and contemporary
theories are thoroughly saturated by sex due to their hypocritical abstractions (Phillips,
1998: 229).

In the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the private individual was the prior
subject (Brown, 1990: 242-293). Both of them explained theoretically how states come
about and provide politically the reference point how the sovereign rules. They claimed
that civil society was formed through a social contract. It was only their consent that
gave governments the right to rule. In Hobbes the sovereign needed absolute power. In
Locke, the duties of government were estimable and individuals have the right to
overthrow a sovereign who had exceeded his legitimate role. However, for both, the
power of rulers was justified only by the consent of those who are ruled.

The contribution of Hobbes and Locke was the individual who had become the key to
legitimate government. Nevertheless, this individual was not any individual. As
Athenian democracy had restricted the rights and responsibilities of citizenship to a
minority by excluding women, immigrants and slaves, Hobbes and Locke asserted
limited rights for women whose submission to men was perpetuated at that period. John
Locke emphasized men while talking about property rights. The individuals whose
consent was the primary issue for these two theorists were men and the creation of the
government was for their interests. The ones who are not even recognized as
individuals, children, servants, lunatics and women who were under the dominance of
their men, were deprived of the political involvement and interests. The emphasis on
individual has usually been one of the starting point for those who criticize the liberal
tradition.

14
The other point is the determined separation between public and private spheres made
by the liberals. Socialists have long argued that the liberal distinction between public
and private builds a disguise of political equality over a society dealing with the
inequalities. This separation has been a central issue for the feminist analysis but with a
different emphasis (Arendt, 1953: 76-85 and 1958: 6). They have been claiming that
liberalism is not the only tradition forming this distinction but almost every political
thinker had an influence (Canovan, 1985: 180). In all societies, distinctions between
public and private have been and have remained fundamental since it was not
unplanned (Harding, 1987: 135-56) .

For Plato and Aristotle the public world of politics was posed against the private world
of the household which was said to be the sphere both of production and reproduction.
The household was necessary but it was a part of the everyday life. It was an ordinary
activity which was not able to nourish rationality. For Aristotle, this meant women had
no place in politics, and their nature was appropriate to the inferior virtues of the
private sphere (Cornell, 1997: 213). Plato, on the other hand, considered women as
possible candidates for the highest political role, but his Republic required the elite
Guardians to give up private homes or family attachments. Although he seemed to
challenge, he solidly restored the convention that the preoccupations of household and
family are incompatible with public life (Lange, 1997: 12).

Liberalism recast the boundaries between public and private. While doing so, it made
two distinctions, not only one. Hannah Arendt does not draw feminist conclusions but
she noted that in the ancient world there was simply one division which was taking
place between the exposed public world of the polis and the hidden private world of the
household. In her thesis in The Human Condition, she states that the household was in
those days both family and economy but, with the subsequent separation of these two,
the new category of the social emerged 'from the shadowy interior of the household
into the light of the public sphere' (Arendt, 1958: 38). This changed the meaning of the
division of the public and private. The social began to fight with the political in order
reign and according to Arendt, won a depressing victory. Politics became the
undiscovered arena of social interest, while the residual household sphere found itself
threatened. Privacy in the ancient world was a state of privation from which citizens
desired to escape. In our era it has become something to be defended against the

15
erosions of political and social life as Anne Phillips states in her book called
'Engendering Democracy' (Phillips, 1991: 29).

Carole Pateman has argued that the liberal theory provides us with a double separation.
Domestic life was initially seen as the most irreducibly private, something
distinguished in its essential principles from all of civil society, which in this context
then appeared as the public domain. The familial was not in fact ignored in classical
theory but once the social contract had been theorized, the domestic dropped all too
rapidly from view. For example, in Hobbes and Locke, there are explicit discussions of
the power of husbands over wives and the power of parents over children, and it is not
possible to ignore their impact on family. Pateman asserts that the creation of civil
society came to be seen as the creation of consenting men, and it was the relationship
between this male society and its male government that then preoccupied liberal
thought (Pateman, 1983: 211). There have been many confrontations between liberals
and socialists focusing on the divisions between public and private, political and social,
state and market. This separation between private and public is re-established as a
division within civil society itself, within the world of men.

Rousseau combines an argument over the interdependence of political and social

equality with a determined exclusion of women from political life. He is among those
who associated women with the lesser virtues of love and affection, regarding them as
naturally unsuited to the demands of justice and kept safely at home.

According to feminists, women and men are not equally autonomous or free. As
socialists have stressed the way that class inequalities ruin supposed political equality,
feminists have stressed the way that inequalities in marriage and the household make a
nonsense of equal political rights. For example, for Pateman, the exclusion of the
domestic from the realm of civil society creates a private individual who is abstracted
from familial relations and because of this he can venture forth into the political arena
as the classically liberal owner of property (Pateman, 1983: 211). From the feminist
perspectives this liberal individual is male, and it is not accidental that women were so
long excluded from those who consent and were not acknowledged as citizens in the
fullest sense of the word.

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As Irish Young states, the women's movement has made public issues out of many
practices claimed too trivial or private for public discussion. The examples are sexual
division of housework, sexual assault on women, domestic violence against women, etc
(Young, 1987: 74). The women's movement has claimed that 'the personal is political'.
Things that used to be dismissed as trivial can no longer be seen as the haphazard result
of individual choice. Things once hidden in the secrecies of private existence are and
need to be of public concern.

'The personal is political' draws attention to the dependence of one sphere on the other.
Democracy in the home is a recondition for democracy abroad. Women are prevented
from participating in public life because of the way their private lives are run. The
division of labor between women and men constitutes for most women a double burden
of work. The way private lives are organized promotes male involvement and reduces
female participation. As Anne Phillips states political equality between women and
men must include substantial changes in the domestic sphere (Phillips, 1991: 99).

Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell discuss the dichotomy between a public sphere of
the economic, and a private, personal realm, assigned naturally to women and they
declare that this places women in a double bind (Benhabib and Cornell, 1987: 9). There
is considerable consensus among Fraser, Young, Benhabib and Markus that the
public/private dichotomy as a principle of social organization, and its ideological
articulation in various conceptions of reason and justice are detrimental to women.

The reflections of the Past on the Current Representation of Women

In many countries claiming to have the title of democracy, for many decades, women
have enjoyed formal equality, sharing with men the right to vote, to stand in elections.
Their participation in voting is now much the same as men's. In the recent decades,
there has been a marked flexibility in the figures for female participation in national
and local politics. Compared to the figures of national politics, local ones are slightly
more promising. We all know there are more men than women in politics, but the
detailed examples even in the highly developed countries are shocking. For example,
only 126 out of 646 members of the British Parliament are women. The question is of
course 'What kind of democracy is this?'

17
The under-representation of women within conventional politics is crucial in thinking
about democracy and gender. The weaknesses and the strengths of current liberal
democratic practice need to be examined more closely. The under-representation of
women shows that there is a problem undoubtedly.

As it is unjust that women should be cooks but no engineers, typists but not managers,
it is also unjust that women should be excluded from the central activities in the
political environment. It is more unfair to claim women should be kept out of this. For
many long years access to political power has been an issue for women. The sexual
differentiation in conditions and experience has produced a specifically woman's point
of view, which is either complementary or antagonistic to the man's. Any system of
representation which consistently excludes the voices of women is not only unfair, it
also does not begin to count as representation.

Conclusion

Feminism has been seen as adding decisive weight to the charges against liberal
democracy and has viewed this tradition as peculiarly resistant to gender concerns.
Among the issues emerging in feminist theory, the most provocative focuses on
universality. As Carole Pateman, Zillah Eisenstein, Iris Marion Young and others have
argued, there is no gender-neutral individual, and they claim that when liberals try to
deal with feminists only in their capacity as abstract citizens, liberals are wishing away
not only differences of class but even differences of sex. Liberal democracy wants to
ignore all local identities and differences. Liberal democrats, in particular, believed
they had extended all necessary rights and freedoms to women when they allowed them
to vote on the same terms as men. This is quite inadequate as the indicators such as the
number of women in politics will show.

Liberals have a good record on issues of discrimination. Feminists desire a future which
is androgynous because they look forward to a time when they are treated as people, no
longer as women and men. The economic and political structures of contemporary
societies exhibit a high degree of sexual and racial segregation. There are definable
groups and group interests in such societies. To start with the most obvious ones which
are based on biological foundation, feminists argue that there is not a legitimate link

18
between people's sex and race with their suitability for the political stage. If women are
not elected in much the same proportions as men, and Africans or Asians in the USA
not elected in broad proportion to their numbers in the electorate as a whole, then it
seems something wrong is going on.

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