TWO CRITIQUES OF PRIVATE SPACE

Privacy and domesticity may have been praised throughout the modern period. There are also powerful criticisms against the construction of privacy and its distinction from the public realm. Dividing the social world into public and private spheres, it is argued, is presented as a natural division. The distinction, however, is,

a powerful ideological tool, reinforcing as natural and inevitable a set of structured inequalities between groups of people—men and women, adults and children—and favouring the interests of some groups at the expense of others, as well as legitimating the dominance of some individuals over others at a more personal level. (Sapsford, 1995:317)

Two strands of criticism, a Marxian and a feminist, stand out as attempts to show how this distinction is socially constructed and how the private sphere is a bourgeois invention to oppress the working class and to limit women.

The Marxian perspective sees the private realm as illegitimate and unjustified, as it is the realm in which private gain is consolidated and privileges maintained. This perspective gives full supremacy to the public, ruling out the private realm, at least in the

3.8 Modernist designs hoped to create machines for living, giving priority to the functions of the private interior over the appearance of the public exterior (London, UK)

contemporary form, which is closely associated with private property and unequal relations between men and women. Marx and Engels, in their Communist Manifesto, took the abolition of private property as its core. They also asked for the abolition of the family. The bourgeoisie, they argued, had torn away the senti-mental veil of the family and had reduced it to a mere money relation. Due to its close association with private property, the family, therefore, was condemned to be abolished in the search for the liberation of the working classes. They wrote: ‘On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain.’ (1985:100). The contemporary family in its developed form only existed among the middle classes, and with the abolition of the private property and the vanishing of capital, it will also disappear.

In the communistic household of a distant past, Engels wrote (1986:79ff), women had the upper hand. In the development of the patriarchal family, it was the concern for property and a social organization to look after the land and the care of the livestock that men found supremacy. The word family originates from the Latin word familia, which in ancient Rome referred to the total number of slaves belonging to one man. By being related from the beginning to agricultural services, the family therefore contains not only slavery but also serfdom. ‘It contains’, Marx wrote, ‘in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state’ (quoted in Engels, 1986:88).

The appearance of the monogamous family was based on the supremacy of man, to ensure the undisputed paternal link to children who inherited the father’s property. This was not an arrangement that came about as the reconciliation between men and women, but as the subjugation of one sex by the other, unknown in previous history. This was the first division of labour, coinciding with the first opposition between social classes. It brought about the possibility of development as well as misery. As Engels put it:

Monogamous marriage was a great historical step forward; nevertheless, together with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backward, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others. (1986:96)

Among the proletariat, the absence of property and the fact that women had to go out to work meant that the proletarian family was different. Ties were looser and women, who could be the family breadwinners, were not always economically inferior. In the bourgeois household, however, where the husband is the main income earner, ‘he is the bourgeois, and the wife represents the proletariat’ (Engels, 1986:105). The first condition for women’s liberation, Engels argued in this influential book, was to bring them back into employment, which in turn demands that the monogamous family be no longer the economic unit of society. This would bring with it a gradual growth of sexual freedom and with it a more tolerant attitude towards ‘a maiden’s honour and a woman’s shame’ (p. 107). From our vantage point in time, we can see how some of these prescriptions of a nineteenth-century revolutionary started to materialize in the twentieth century, even though not through the abolition of private property as he and Marx had envisaged.

The rise of the intimate space, in which the modern family of parents and children

were the core inhabitants, was only made possible through a new form of relationship between men and women. This relationship, feminists argue, locked women in an inferior position and as such was unfair.

As Zaretsky (1976) argues, the family is where almost all personal needs are expected to be met. Here is where personal freedom can be protected from the impersonal and anonymous worid of capitalism. But the price for this personal freedom is a heavy burden on family members, particularly women, who are forced into isolation. Feminist writers have elaborated on this theme by discussing the way the family restricts women: it regulates their labour through the role of the housewife; it gives men more power over women’s sexuality and fertility; and it structures and reinforces gender identities that are separate and inequitable (Muncie and Sapsford, 1995:25–6).

Both processes of public-private separation, inside and outside the house, redefined the role of gender as another arena for differentiation and specialization. The house was associated with the women’s realm, as distinct from the male public sphere outside (Figure 3.9). But even inside the house, there was a gender differentiation associated with the new functional specialization of space. In larger houses, the drawing room was the women’s space, where they ‘withdrew’ after dinner. The men’s domain was the study or the library. In the smaller houses, the women’s realm was functionally associated with the kitchen (Roberts, 1991).

The processes that helped separate the home from work and established the new distinction between the public and private realms have been criticized by feminist writers.

Thinkers such as Habermas (1989), who blame mass society for a loss of distinction between the public and private spheres and the negative effects of this process on public sphere, are criticized for idealizing the gender differentiation (Fraser, 1989).

Women were located within the private sphere and were associated with domesticity, maternity and dependence. Without restricting them to a narrow range of roles and spaces, the creation of a private sphere as a safe haven from the impersonal world of outside was impossible. Men, on the other hand, were associated with the public realm, the world of work, politics, breadwinning, autonomy and responsibility. The creation of private realm of the family may have been a necessity for its members to cope with the complexity of urban life. This, however, placed on women the major burden of maintaining the safe haven. The feminist writers, not unlike the Marxist writers, criticized the family for the power relations that it embodied and reproduced. The family and the distinction between the public and private were seen as the source of women’s oppression, which structured and institutionalized unequal roles and opportunities for men and women.

The design of the house reflected this oppression of women, as it provided a material framework for the condition of women inside domestic space (Boys et al., 1984).

Therefore, the design of the non-sexist home was to change. The experience of Swedish collaborative housing was praised, where multi-unit houses were built with extended shared facilities and collaboration among residents (Sangregorio, 1995). As Hayden suggested in the 1980s, ‘attacking the conventional division between public and private space should become a socialist and feminist priority’ (Hayden, 1996:153). The single family suburban house, where women were isolated and trapped, could be rehabilitated to

3.9 The suburban house was seen as isolating women and excluding them from the public sphere dominated by men (Newcastle, UK)

introduce community services and common areas. Larger houses could be converted to a number of smaller units. Groups of suburban houses could be altered in new ways:

To replace empty front lawns without sidewalks, neighbours can create blocks where single units are converted to multiple units; interior land is pooled to create a parklike setting at the centre of the block; front and side lawns are fenced to make private outdoor spaces; pedestrian paths and sidewalks are created to link all units with the central open space; and some private porches, garages, pool sheds, utility rooms, and family rooms are converted to community facilities such as children’s play areas, dial-a-ride garages, and laundries. (Hayden, 1996:151)