Privacy Rights/Philosophical Origins/Tradition contributions/Feminist Thought

Privacy Rights

What have religious and philosophical traditions contributed to our understanding of this right?

Feminist Thought

Various feminist theorists have often been forgotten because of their role as women and the fact that society sees their input as invalid because of the long history of their treatment. However, despite the oppression and the push to exclude them from political conversations, women have entered the conversation claiming that the true problem in life is patriarchy. Their commentary surrounds the involvement of men within the government and how the male-dominated government suppresses women. They can generally agree on most political discussions like the right to privacy, but that is not to say that it does not come without variation as all political theory usually does. The consensus among the feminists is that the private realm maintains the oppression of women and propose the elimination of the private realm to remedy the problem at hand, despite some thoughts on the return to the private realm once the problem has been solved socially first.

Most feminist political commentary and theory is centered around the critique of the relationship between the private and the public spheres that inherently treats women as less than compared to their male counterpart. In her political commentary Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia noted that “He has no personal life. He completely identifies private with public interest. Hence, he is unstoppable. Such men can be political geniuses or monsters” (Paglia 1990, 214). In fact, Bell Hooks would go as far to claim that men are told to dominate the private sphere despite giving women the belief that the home and the private realm will be theirs to dominate and to rule over (Hooks 1984, 120). Paglia and Hooks both demonstrate the point that the feminists paint a picture where the power of the public outweigh the power of the private and since women are taught that the private will be their realm, they are inherently less important compared to their male counterparts. Paglia also details something important in the fact that the men of society can either help or hurt women because of the power they possess in the public and the private, yet most feminists would argue that they choose to abuse women within their spheres because of the way that Hooks says that they are encouraged to dominate women any way that they can. These sentiments reflect the critiques of the relationship between the private and public spheres that dominates the arguments made by feminists on the matter of the right to privacy and hence why some are skeptical about maintain that right. Susan Moller Okin’s work Justice, Gender, and Family noted that, “If there were a clear sphere from which the state refrained from intruding, that sphere would have to be defined, and its definition would be a political issue. But in fact, the state has not just "kept out of family life. In innumerable ways, the state determines and enforces the terms of marriage” (Okin 1989, 129). To Okin, the dichotomy between the private and the public realms is central to her argument for the elimination of the private sphere because of the lack of justice maintained within this sphere. Okin uses this to further the point that there is no separation because of the state’s involvement in issues like women’s bodies and marriage that make the separation unrealistic since within the minds of men, the two are automatically linked without any clear distinctions. The feminists use examples of abortion and marriage to further prove that the lines between the state and the home are blurred and often nonexistent because the state makes decisions without consulting women or even acknowledging the boundary that should be there. Okin even claims that the boundary is artificial and only created based off the different principles that the men have on these matters. However, she highlights the lack of justice for women due to the difference in principles in men that allow them to abuse their women and belittle them from reaching their full potential within society.

Some theorists see the role of the traditional woman with her duties and her obligations to the family as invasive and a problem when it comes to the right to privacy for a woman. Written in 1903, Charlotte Perkins Gilman makes the claim that, “The mother—poor invaded soul—finds even the bathroom door no bar to hammering little hands. From parlour to kitchen, from cellar to garret, she is at the mercy of children, servants, tradesmen, and callers. So chased and trodden is she that the very idea of privacy is lost to her mind; she never had any, she doesn't know what it is, and she cannot understand why her husband should wish to have any "reserves," any place or time, any thought or feeling, with which she may not make free” (Gilman 1903, 36). Gilman makes the assertion that the role women have taken on within the home means that there is no such privacy for the woman whatsoever. It is because she has other obligations as a mother, as a wife, as a caregiver that something is always expected from her and that her needs are irrelevant because she “rules” the home. She claims that there is also no possibility for individual privacy because there is no specific space for just the individual unless they are living alone. However, within the family, the individual is crowded by those around, and as stated before the role of the woman is to serve everyone and everything according to the standards set by the man. She adds that if the individual was truly private, there would be no scrutiny or judgement because the individual is truly private about their thoughts and their feelings, but this concept of privacy is only applicable to the man who rules the home and is always free to express themselves within the home. It is the woman who is continuously repressed in and out of the home and is in constant contact with the other women and servants of the neighborhood with whom they share and continuously violate the idea of privacy. In Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach by Martha Nussbaum, Nussbaum noted that, “It goes without saying that in poor families where five or six people share a single room, there is no such thing as the privacy of the individual in the middle-class American sense – although poor people will frequently seek solitude for the purpose of defecation, walking considerable distances from their dwellings” (Nussbaum 2000, 259). Nussbaum and Gilman both illustrate the life of the woman in which she is subjected to the needs of the family and expected to run the household without being given the respect that should come with the role. She continues the argument by claiming that individuals have the right to privacy within their decisional liberties, but for women and in general the home limits the space where the individual can carry out their liberties simply because the lack of space. Nussbaum decides to remedy this by claiming that the state should be allowed to intervene so long as they do so to protect only the privacy the individual has in the form of decisional liberties the individual holds. Even though she speaks in broader terms about the individual, she emphasizes the fact, as Gilman points out, that the role of the women is far more extensive than that of the man within the home and therefore, her privacy is severely more limited than that of the man within the home. In the process of the state protecting the liberties of the individual, Nussbaum would claim that the needs of the woman need to be acknowledged and enforced in order to maintain her decisional liberties.

Alongside the critique of the public and private spheres mentioned above, theorists propose a reconstruction of the public and private life that would eventually liberate women from the abuse and violence they face. In her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects by Mary Wollstonecraft, she noted that “To render women truly useful members of society, I argue that they should be led, by having their understandings cultivated on a large scale, to acquire a rational affection for their country, founded on knowledge, because it is obvious that we are little interested about what we do not understand. And to render this general knowledge of due importance, I have endeavoured to shew that private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart; and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private” (Wollstonecraft 1792, 291). Part of the larger and general feminist argument for privacy is the reconstruction of the private and public realms so that there could possibly be the existence of the private sphere once the problems are addressed. For Wollstonecraft, part of the progression of women is to form the new public sphere around the education of the women in order to maintain the public happiness. Wollstonecraft claims that the means of some private virtue is the same as the public happiness since whatever happens within the private is brought out into the public. For that reason, Wollstonecraft argues that the public and the private are utterly the same since the state already tries to solve the problems that take place within the private space of the home. However, within the home, she notes that the role of the woman is to please the man and because of this she is denied her public and civil duties which again can be rectified by educating women and men about the opinions and the manner which society enforces. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan noted that, “Their determination betrays women’s underestimated human strength and their urgent need to use it. But only the strongest, after nearly twenty years of the feminine mystique, can move on by themselves. For this is not just the private problem of each individual woman. There are implications of the feminine mystique that must be faced on a national scale” (Friedan 1963, 350-351). Friedan wanted to remedy the inequalities that she saw within the private life, by demolishing the line between the public and the private by exposing the inequalities that the women faced within the private life. In order to reform and reconstruct life to benefit women, her solution was to promote education and find something beyond the self to identify with. Her idea that was if women were able to reimagine themselves, they would be able to overcome the problems and show society the way that women should be treated. Freidan’s concept of the private however was aligned with Gilman and Nussbaum in that the duties of the woman prevent actual privacy, so she proposed another separate space away from the family in which the woman can achieve a sense of privacy. In order to reimagine themselves within the public, Friedan proposed private and public education like Wollstonecraft proposed, and suggested challenging the images of women proposed by the media. When it came to the media specifically, she wanted women to reimagine themselves using their own private image to facilitate what their version of what a woman looked like. Feminists in general proposed their own version of reconstructing the public to change the way women were viewed which usually involved exposing their problems to the public, completely ignoring the idea of the private individual.

Despite the constant call for the barrier between the public and the private to be broken, there are some claims to a right to privacy made by the feminists. Catherine MacKinnon noted this in her work Toward a Feminist Theory of the State when she claimed that “The law of privacy treats the private sphere as a sphere of personal freedom. For men, it is. For women, the private is the distinctive sphere of intimate violation and abuse, neither free nor particularly personal. Men's realm of private freedom is women's realm of collective subordination.” (MacKinnon 1989, 168). Most feminist theorists agree to some sort of concept of the private and what that might look like. Most feminists were skeptical of the private because of all the abuse that took place within this sphere, hence why they wanted the government to intervene in the matters of the private. However, as MacKinnon pointed out, the private provided personal freedom that the public could not provide, hence why it was important to revisit the private sphere once the woman was reimagined and re-envisioned for the better. MacKinnon acknowledged the fact that there were legal protections about privacy for women since there were these protections for men but based on examples surrounding abortion and marriage concluded that even though it was legally available for women, it was not enforced. Specifically, the government rulings on issues like Roe v. Wade gave women the private right to choose, but she recognized that the fact that the government had a say on this matter, was an invasion of the privacy of the women to choose. Even the discussion of whether the government would fund abortions became a matter of government involvement on a woman’s decision to choose. After her discussion of this matter, she established that the right to privacy was necessary and continuously violated by the government in order to maintain control over women. Carole Pateman extends this argument within her work The Sexual Contract when she notes that, “Shultz states that there is a strong argument that private contract should not override the criminal law but, she writes, 'the idea of enforceable private agreements concerning violent sexual conduct is less offensive than a state declaration that violent sexual conduct is automatically acceptable in marriage.' Such a response begs the question about limitations to and alternatives to contract” (Pateman 1988, 185). Pateman specifically notes that the relationship between the government and the people on matters of private and public is something that is important for the safety of women and for the natural liberties for the individual. She notes that what calls the sexual contract is something women are subjected to where their abuse accumulates at home and sometimes within the public. She called for government intervention on matters of legally maintaining women’s liberties and for intervention when men within the private life continuously abused women. Pateman noted that the line between the public and the private was indefinite and used the system of marriage as an example of how the government was involved. She claimed that because the government had to keep records of marriage contracts between private individuals, marriage could be considered public, despite the specific agreements within the marriage contract is a private matter talked and agreed upon by the different parties. She still notes in the end that the government had some obligation within the private lives to reform the treatment of women and the inequalities that women face within the home, an attitude shared by most of the feminist theorists.

The consensus among the feminists is that the private sphere is where women are subjects of abuse and inequalities that need to be exposed out in the public in order to help women overcome the view that men have of them. To these theorists' women face the same treatment within the public sphere as the patriarchy and the government make decisions on their behalf and subject them to the private life where they are expected to take care of the family. The primary role of the woman centers around the idea of the family and the way that the woman is supposed to take care of the family depriving her of her own privacy. Jean Bethke Elshtain adds an interesting perspective to this notion and considers that as women are liberated by their actions, the structure of the family will fall apart. She adds that the family dynamic is also changing as there are more single parent households or same-sex households that change the way the family has been thought of (Elshtain 1981, 323). This is an interesting notion as the thought of the private sphere changes for these women and the way that women are taking more charge within the world continuously challenging the private abuse at the hands of the man. The notion of the right to privacy is something constantly changing as situations change but should be broken down to expose the flaws within the system that negatively affect women.

Bibliography

Elshtain, Jean Bethke. Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought - Second Edition. NED-New edition, 2. Princeton University Press, 1981. https://doi.org/10.2307/ j.ctv131bvkg.

Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Dell Publishing Company INC. 1973

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Home. New York Charlton Company. 1910

Hooks, Bell. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. South End Press

Mackinnon, Catherine A. 1989. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Harvard University Press

Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach. Cambridge University Press

Okin, Susan Moller. 1989. Justice, Gender, and the Family. Basic Books Inc.

Paglia, Camille. “Shakespeare and Dionysus: As You Like It and Antony and Cleopatra.” In Sexual Personae, 194–229. Yale University Press, 1990. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bh4bwb.12.

Pateman, Carole. The Sexual Contract. Stanford University Press, 1988.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1792. A Vindication of the Rights of Women with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. Cambridge University Press