“Public Man” and “Private Woman”: Discourse and Practice in Western Societies

Abstract

The images of “public man” and “private woman” are cultural norms belonging to an entire epoch in Western societies. The origins of modern and civil thought are linked to the construction and elaboration of these two images. For more than a century, paradoxically, the essential and almost thoroughly unexamined component of enlightened thought and concepts of democracy is that women have been often forcibly restricted to the private sphere. The images of “public man” and “private woman” do not emerge in Western societies until the end of the eighteenth century. They are products of a societal development that bring about major changes in both the economy (industrialization) and culture (bourgeois culture).