ABSTRACT
As a feminist-to-feminist communiqué, this book succeeds in its limited aims. Privacy has played an ideological function, masking oppressive relations within the family, and obscuring the way state power has supported patriarchal relationships in intimate life. The two exceptions are her very fine linguistic analysis of “private,” “public,” and “political,” which does genuinely both reveal and clarify ambiguities, subtleties, and complexities in these conceptual complexes and her correct dismissal of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s critique of privacy as purely derivative as essentially irrelevant. The intellectual world as described by Boling begins somewhere in the 1950s, with citations of largely ephemeral works that have neither stood, nor will stand, the test of time. The absence of history and context is just as visible in the discussion of privacy as in the discussion of the politics of intimate life.
