Feminists have known for some time that the issue of gender is larger than the question of formal rights to social and political equality and that it extends to the more complex questions of intimacy. That understanding has not always been effectively transmitted because the ideas of private and intimate have generally been run together. The private sphere has been conceived to include everything that is a non-public matter—hence the tendency to view gender in terms of the private (economic) or property. The occasional (non-systematic) reference by feminists to a domestic sphere—though the term is similarly overburdened with economic meanings—reflects the need for a concept that does not reduce the family to a microcosm of the subsystem of the economy. In my view, there are considerable advantages in keeping the intimate and private spheres conceptually distinct. In particular, we can isolate the gender issue of the (legally secured) social-sexual arrangements of modernity, which are not in themselves “constituted in legal form,” from gender-related questions—for example, the enfranchisement of women—that can, and have been, successfully posed in the logic of public and private. The idea of an intimate sphere does not deny the connection of the family to the state and the economy—to the contrary, it is meant to theorize that connection. However, the idea leads to challenging questions for theory because questions related to intimacy are not simply a matter of personal decision (the family as an institution is formally secured), and they are not amenable— without a loss of freedom—to formal resolution (internal family relationships are by their nature informally regulated).
Up to a point then, my concerns cannot be equated with worries about whether or not Habermas has idealized the bourgeois public. I concur that the zeal with which he pursues the principle of inclusiveness seems to lead to a valorization of a “one” public which is increasingly suspect. I also sympathize with efforts to resist that valorization by directing attention to alternative “publics,” whether historical or actual or potential.55 At the same time we need to rethink the concept of public in relation to the gender issue. That will involve a new logic of gender relations. I cannot address the nature of that logic here, but, to judge from feminist researches in many fields, it would have to include a concept of humanity that can tolerate the idea of a “differentiated we.” The category of gender must also become central to the philosophical discourse of modernity. If it is true that, for modernity, humanity’s “genuine site” is the intimate sphere—and it is possible to show that Habermas’s later work not only does not deny this important insight, but actually supports it—the claim to truth of the bourgeois concept of humanity cannot be redeemed, as he thought, in a public sphere that presupposes the historically specific sex — gender relations of modernity.
I began this essay with the question of women’s historical claims to rights to inclusion and equality. These claims were not intended as radical. As a group, women shared in the values of literacy and did not challenge the identification of bourgeois and homme. However, the redemption of those claims demands a radical reconceptualization not only of sex/gender relations, but also of the public/private/intimate spheres in which those relations are socially and politically organized.