Feminist Jurisprudence: Illusion or Reality?

Abstract

Illusion or Reality? Introduction: Public and private worldsLaw is not only a powerful mechanism for social control by the state, but also a powerful conduit for the transmission and reproduction of the dominant ideology.Accordingly, law has been used to maintain a rigid line of demarcation between the two analytically distinct spheres of public and private; the former has been designated the world of men, the latter the world of women.However, far from the two spheres being commensurate, there is a marked asymmetry between them.Hannah Arendt, for example, accepts as axiomatic the existence of an ontological dualism between public and private. 1 Freedom and equality are realisable only among citizens in the public sphere, for the private sphere is perceived to be the locus of domination and inequality. 2 Nevertheless, Arendt has chosen to ignore the fact that the 'society of equals' was traditionally confined to male citizens alone.She has also chosen to ignore the violence emanating from the public sphere, as manifested in foreign policy, for example, to emphasise what she considers to be the noble and ethical intellectualism of the polis, while implicitly denigrating the private sphere's association with nature and nurture.The historical exclusion of women from the society of equals, together with the elevation of the public above the private sphere, is typical of mainstream thought-aphoristically termed 'male-stream' by Mary O'Brien.31

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