Paper's abstract

Timothy O'Hagan, Public and Private, Men and Women
The author first examines the "liberal" defence of privacy, as the "right to be left alone", the protection of an area of intimacy, within which the individual can flourish, free from external "interference". He then considers why women have had good grounds to be suspicious of the right to privacy, insofar as that right has placed a cordon sanitaire around the family, and so protected the despotism of men over women within the home. But he concludes, with Hannah Arendt and Martha Nussbaum, that the correct response to this historical abuse is not to attack the value of privacy as such, but rather to extend the public protection of the law to individuals within the family, and thereby protect a real, egalitarian domain of privacy for both men and women. He also notes the influence of changing technologies and market forces on the role of the family and on the distinction between the public and private domains. He concludes by describing the different evaluations which have been placed on public and private activity in the past and in the present, and criticizes the new economic libertarians for improperly conflating the deepest values of privacy with the unbridled operation of the free market.

Key Words : privacy, woman, Arendt, public, liberal
t. 41, 1997 : p. 43-51

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