Women's Roles
ELSHTAIN, JEAN BETHKE
Women's Roles PUBLIC MAN, PRIVATE WOMAN by Jean Bethke Elshtain Princeton University Press. 378 pp. $25 hardcover. $6.95 paperback. The first 200 pages of Public Man, Private Woman are bound to...
...It carries profoundly resonant emotional and sexual imperatives...
...Public Man, Private Woman is a good book with which to break that habit...
...A tendency to downplay the differences that pertain between, say, mothering and holding a job, not only drains our private relations of much of their significance, but also oversimplifies what can or should be done to alter things for women, who are frequently urged to change roles to solve their problems...
...The challenge, in her mind, is to free women without imprisoning children or losing the potential for all that is rich and good in family relationships...
...I wish, too, that she had explored more deeply—and sympathetically—the rising hysteria in feminist discourse...
...In Elshtain's own Utopia, "diverse spheres and competing ideals and purposes" exist in tension...
...She believes the quality of family life and the quality of political life are inevitably linked, with influence flowing in both directions...
...Liberals say it is just another place to play roles...
...She urges feminist political thinkers to listen more carefully and with less bias to what women—all women, pink ladies, too— have to say for themselves, now that their long silence has been broken...
...The place to start reading is Page 201, where Jean Bethke Elshtain, one of the arch-iconoclasts of the feminist movement, gets down to what she is good at: throwing stones at glass houses...
...Radical feminists dismiss the family as poisoned by patriarchy...
...Mothering is a complicated, rich, ambivalent, vexing, joyous activity which is biological, natural, social, symbolic, and emotional...
...Now she makes the point (not original) that some feminist thinkers are doing the same thing...
...But Elshtain is not happy with what she sees as attempts to escape the constraints of the private world by devaluing it altogether...
...Aristotle and all the other political theorists down through the centuries who asserted the primacy of politics, and viewed man (the male, at any rate, if not generic humanity) as preeminently a political animal even as they downgraded or simply took for granted the private sphere, were guilty of a serious distortion," she says...
...Elshtain's proposal for moving our real world a little closer to that ideal is modest to the point of seeming anticlimactic...
...Elshtain mistrusts proposals that glorify state care of children...
...What distinguishes her thinking from the theories she criticizes is her doubt that any social state can be "accomplished"—fixed and finished—or should be...
...I wish she had said more in Public Man, Private Woman about what she had in mind...
...In her first 200 pages Elshtain made the point that Western thinkers have asserted the primacy of the public world—the political sphere dominated by men—and denigrated the private world—the familial sphere dominated by women...
...Elshtain, a mother as well as a political scientist, protests: "Mothering is not a 'role' on par with being a file clerk, a scientist, or a member of the Air Force...
...One must find out how the female subject in our time sees herself, or would, were she given the opportunity to provide a spoken account of her existence...
...It is in the family—in its "powerful, eroticized relations with specific others"—that human beings learn to relate to other human beings, to act in concert or conflict on the public stage...
...Marxists reduce it to a link in the economic chain...
...Some women, Elshtain contends, rightly have come to resent their containment in private ghettos, the silencing of their voices, their exclusion from public life...
...The first 200 pages are a dull and scholarly discourse on the concepts of public and private worlds in Western philosophy...
...Carol Polsgrove (Carol Polsgrove is a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...Elshtain offers a very different conceptual response to the traditional denigration of the private world: She proclaims the primacy of the familial world over the political world...
...The feminist movement's focus, in her eyes, has been too much on woman as object, not enough on woman as subject...
...It should come as no surprise that the variety of feminism Elshtain likes best is psychoanalytic feminism (although she criticizes its practitioners for over-assimilating the political world into the private...
...The glass houses, in this instance, are those of radical feminists, Marxist feminists, and liberal feminists...
...In the psychoanalytic dialogue, Elshtain finds a model for a political discourse that would be the "mirror image" of our acrimonious debates over abortion: She calls for a discourse under circumstances that are not "manipulative, coercive, or silencing...
...Neither public nor private world drains or overwhelms the other...
...The first 200 pages of Public Man, Private Woman are bound to discourage readers who believe one must always start a book at the beginning and read straight through to the end...
...I wish she had wrapped up those first 200 pages on the past into a good, solid chapter and given more of her space to the present...
...It makes sense, given her running emphasis on the individual's capacity for self-reflection, her distaste for Utopias cut from whole cloth without regard for the rags and tatters (and splendors) in which history, our own time, and pur personal experience have dressed us...
...I do not think she overestimates the ease with which this can be accomplished...
...But even when she is not quite convincing, when she hangs her argument on too slender threads, at least she is challenging attempts to replace old silences with new ones...
Vol. 46 • March 1982 • No. 3
