The division between ‘public’ and ‘private’ is artificial; the terms only make sense through opposition to each other. The public is that which is not private and vice versa (Pateman, 1988). For feminists ‘the private’ usually referred to the domestic sphere, but there are other usages of the term which refer to civil society, for example ‘private enterprise’ (Pateman, 1989: 133—4). Focusing on understanding the private as the domestic emerged from seeing it as opposite to a ‘public sphere’ thought to consist of things to do with the state, the economy and arenas of public discourse (Fraser, 1997: 70). The public, in other words, was the non-domestic. However, feminists mostly used these as useful working definitions rather than intransigent descriptions of truth. They clearly recognized that they needed to challenge the way in which most discussions of politics assumed that there really was a separation between public and private (Pateman, 1989: 131).
The slogan ‘the personal is political’ was iconic in expressing this challenging of how public and private were distinguished. There were different interpretations of what the slogan ‘the personal is political’ actually meant. Some feminists took it as an insistence on the need to see women’s everyday experiences put on the political agenda. Others began to promote it as an encouragement to women to change themselves as a political act (Whelehan, 1995:13). Both interpretations emerged from the consciousness-raising groups which were crucial to the burgeoning of second-wave feminism and to the development of its political and intellectual distinction from earlier forms of feminist political activity. Consciousness-raising groups consisted of small groups of women who met regularly to share their experiences of living as a woman within a male-dominated society. So, for example, a group of women might meet to discuss menstruation. They were likely to discuss the shame they had been made to feel when menstruating and might see this as related to general negative social attitudes to women’s bodies which help constrain women. The aim was to appreciate the similarities between women and thus achieve an understanding of their oppression within patriarchal society which would foster collective political action. However they did not always agree on which ‘personal’ issues were in need of political attention, or on what form that attention should take. Feminists were not simply revealing the reality of experiences previously thought ‘personal’, they were constructing new stories about the political significance of those experiences (Barrie, 1987). Feminists challenged the point at which, to paraphrase C. Wright Mills (1959), personal troubles became public issues. By seeing everyday aspects of women’s lives as being political, feminists were challenging representations of ‘the personal’ in patriarchal society.