Public Man, Private Woman
Canovan, Margaret
Unfulfilled promise of nastiness PUBLIC MAN. PRIVATE WOMAN WOMEN IN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THOUGHT Jean Bethke Elshtain Princeton University Press, $25, $6.95 paper, 378 pp. Margaret Canovan IN...
...MARGARET CANOVAN is professor of politics at the University of Keele in England...
...As Hannah Arendt and Richard Sennett have tried to explain, civilization means the possession of a public world outside each one of us, with its own traditions and standards, its own concerns...
...thing Ms...
...Her heart is clearly in the right place, and the book is not nasty at all: in fact, its faults are not private ones of nastiness versus niceness, but public faults like lack of clarity, economy, and form...
...Margaret Canovan IN the early days of women's emancipation, before modern feminists had got them on the run, confident male chauvinists had ready arguments against the involvement of women in politics and culture...
...dissertation for Yale, contributes a column on recordings to Commonweal...
...Anticipation is heightened when Ms...
...In fact the book livens up so much at this point that one wonders whether the first section was really just an alibi, designed to salve the author's feminist conscience and demonstrate that she hadn't sold out to the men...
...Incredibly, at no point in all her 378 pages does Ms...
...Instead, they are rambling, easily diverted, lacking in control over their ideas...
...Her most recent book is Populism (Harcourt, Brace...
...First of all, she looks (with tedious wordiness) at "traditional political theory," Plato to Marx, from a feminist perspective...
...Elshtain had set back her children's development by cuffing them around the ear, telling them to keep quiet, and concentrating on getting her argument clear, she might well have written a much better one...
...To the annoyance of sensible women, many present-day feminists seem to be doing their best to prove the old male chauvinists right...
...What with their tone and their harking back to Mother-images and nature mysticism, one is reminded of the dark Dionysian fury that (according to the Greeks) had to be kept under in the interests of Apollonian calm and objectivity...
...Where an artist or statesman is concerned, what matters is not the private person, her strong feelings and good intentions, but her public achievements...
...Elshtain announces in her Preface that 'Public Man, Private Woman is a nasty book.' Alas, she does not live up to her promise...
...She is particularly hard on Plato, whose Utopian schemes she sees not as an early case of women's lib but as a defensive response to fear of women (especially Mother...
...After taking the political philosophers to task, Ms...
...DERRICK HENRY, presently completing a Ph.D...
...Above all, women lack control over themselves: they are emotional and unbalanced, they take everything personally, they lack detachment and objectivity...
...The chapter is disappointing, but it is also revealing...
...and that means, for example, listening to other women even when they are saying unpalatable things (campaigning against abortion, for instance...
...Elshtain often talks good sense: for example, she points out that any serious feminist politics would have to treat individual women as subjects and not just objects...
...Women's minds, they used to say, don't have masculine lucidity: they lack a sharp sense of logic and relevance, a virile ability to impose form upon matter...
...The curious thing about all this, though, is how little light it sheds on what is suppposed to be the book's subject, namely the relation between public and private...
...The book ends with a chapter on "Reconstructing the Public and Private: Toward a Critical Theory of Women in Politics...
...peter STEINFELS is executive editor of Commonweal...
...MARY lefkowitz is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Wellesley College...
...And I regret to say that if Ms...
...Maternal thinking" is no help in writing political theory: why should it be any more useful in political action...
...She offers no evidence for this, but then neither did Freud for his theories about the primal Father and the foundation of states...
...Too often, their books are rambling, incoherent, embarrassingly personal, and awash with great tides of uncontrolled emotion...
...Now, from a private point of view this does great credit to the author - she is clearly a good mother...
...JOHN L. STIPP is professor emeritus of history at Knox College in Illinois...
...Elshtain even make clear what she means by the terms, while her proposals for a "politics of compassion" derived from the feminine standpoint of "maternal thinking" suggest that she has never detached herself sufficiently from a private point of view to appreciate what is involved in the existence of a private world...
...This, clearly, should be the crux: the point at which the author should explain just what the relation between public and private life ought to be...
...Her books include Heroines and Hysterics and The Lives of the Greek Poets (Johns Hopkins...
...Elshtain says...
...In view of the traditional claim that men alone can appreciate public values, the idea of looking at the relation between private and public life from the perspective of women seems, on the face of it, an interesting one...
...These public values, whether political or aesthetic, are not derived from personal values, and may often contradict the latter...
...This is the best bit of the book, and the author shows courage and good sense in her criticisms of the various versions of feminism, "radical," "liberal," "Marxist," and "psychoanalytic...
...one much nastier than anyREVIEWERS rosemary haughton'j most recent book is The Passionate God (Paulist Press...
...In typically mushy style, she proclaims in her Acknowledgments that her book's "deep, enriching connection" with "real life" stems from the fact that her four children, Sheri, Heidi, Jenny, and Eric, "were never hustled out of sight, earshot, or mind as I struggled with this text...
...Elshtain's project has three stages...
...At several places in the book, indeed, she repeats that political institutions have been to a large extent a defense erected by men against Mother...
...Elshtain moves on to scrutinize contemporary feminism...
...Not surprisingly, she finds a good deal to criticize...
...Perhaps this can be made clear through an example...
...She also provides a vigorous defense of the family against feminist attack...
...But intellectual and political activities demand the subordination of personal interests and qualities to public standards...
...But the standards of the public world are not concerned with Sheri, Heidi, Jenny, and Eric: public criteria are interested only in the question whether, as an author who has laid out her work before the public gaze, she has or has not written a good book...
...And (so the men used to say) when women emerge from the private world of personal relations in which they belong, they demonstrate how unfitted they are to appear in the harsh light of the public sphere...
Vol. 109 • May 1982 • No. 9
