ABSTRACT
Turner does not observe that the structural relations between the private and the public, as well as their meanings, are essential components of the understanding of gender differences in modern democracies (Pateman 1988). Walby (1994:383) notices that in Turner’s framework the private arena can have two different meanings: (a) the autonomy of the individual in the family; and (b) individual freedom from state intervention. The feminist point is that individual autonomy in the liberal model does not apply to women, because women are both in theory and in practice subordinated as dependent wives (Pateman 1988). The ‘private’ arena is, both in practice and in theory, a contradictory term for women: a site of caring and mothering as well as a site of oppression and dependency (Walby 1994). The implication is that the different perceptions of the private and the public arena in political philosophy, as well as the construction of the border between the public and private arena, have gendered implications (Lister 1995). The feminist perspective illuminates the need for state regulation of families and for an expansion of public responsibilities for caring for children and the elderly that transcends the different models of citizenship (Knijn and Kremer 1997; Yuval-Davis 1996).
