ABSTRACT
Feminisms’ relationship with, and in, the public sphere has always been difficult, because the public sphere is constituted upon the bedrock of traditional liberal theory and practice. The result for those who wish to reconcile the contradictions between woman as a subject ‘different’ from the individual championed by liberalism, yet still logically entitled to the equality that liberalism bequeathed, is a status Joan Scott describes as ‘feminism’s incurable paradoxical condition’.3 This ‘incurable paradoxical condition’ is exacerbated by the location of men and women into the categories of ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres. Western, liberal law is a key arbiter of the divide between the two. It wields great power in determining how, and when, women can be conceived of as equal citizens within the foundations of liberal theory, and when they must remain in the private. It is for this reason that legal feminists have always, in particular, been held in the grip of the ‘paradoxical condition’, and sought theoretical and practical ways of dealing with it.4
