Introduction

Abstract

The gendered nature of the public and private spheres, economy and polity versus home and family, has long operated as given in traditional sociology. The sociological task has been to document the emergence of these spheres, to understand their interrelations, and to reveal the ideological dimension of their operation. In the course of this task, the artificial nature of the division itself has become apparent, manifest for example in arguments about the productive nature of domestic work, the gendered assumptions and controls embedded in aspects of social policy, gender segregation in the labour market, etc. There is still, however, a need for research which records the way in which aspects of the public sphere can be shaped around assumptions carried over from the private, and the way in which the private sphere is shaped by influences generated in the public. Thus, in the spirit of C. Wright Mills (1973) and his concern to link private troubles to public issues, we offer here some documentation of the inter-connections of the public and private spheres.