By Habermas’s own account, then, the oppositional bourgeois public sphere only partially achieved its stated goals of equality and participation. But he sees this as a limitation of actually existing society, not of the model of a universal public according to which pre-existing social inequalities are bracketed. Within the region of social discourse, he believes, a public body is created wherein the differential rights of private individuals cease to matter. Yet, there were strong requirements for admission to this club as to any other. Even if property did not become a topic for discourse, it remained the precondition for participation in the bourgeois public sphere. Furthermore, because the public sphere and the conditions for publicity presupposed a distinction between public and private matters, it was ill equipped to consider in public fashion the political dimension of relations in the intimate sphere. Equally disabling was the expectation that all those who engaged in public discourse would learn to master the rules of disinterested discourse. Under ideal conditions, then, the members of a theoretical public were to behave according to the bourgeois liberal principle of abstract equality. Just as the laws of market assumed a certain forgetfulness concerning the real existence of property, so too the laws of the public sphere were predicated on the principle of disinterestedness and on the observance of the norms of reason not power, rationality not domination, and truth not authority. Still, Habermas never asks whether certain subjects in bourgeois society are better suited than others to perform the discursive role of participants in a theoretical public.
In my study Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, however, I argued that Habermas’s formulation effaces the way in which the bourgeois public sphere from the outset worked to rule out all interests that would not or could not lay claim to their own universality.20 The notion of an enlightened, theoretical public reduced to “mere opinion” (cultural assumptions, normative attitudes, collective prejudices, and values) a whole range of interests associated with those actors who would not or could not master the discourse of the universal. Moreover, the structural division between the public sphere, on the one hand, and the market and the family, on the other, meant that a whole range of concerns came to be
labeled as private and treated as improper subjects for public debate. Habermas overlooks the strong association of women’s discourse and their interests with “particularity,” and conversely the alignment of masculine speech with truth, objectivity, and reason. Thus, he misses the masquerade through which the (male) particular was able to posture behind the veil of the universal.
In any event, none of this was the accidental consequence of the lesser status of women in pre-liberal society, to be amended in a more democratic order. Rather, the resistance of enlightened liberal and democratic discourse to femininity was rooted in a symbolization of nature that promised to reverse the spoiled civilization of le monde where stylish women held sway and to return to men the sovereign rights usurped by an absolutist monarch. Furthermore, when women during the French Revolution and the nineteenth century attempted to organize in public on the basis of their interests, they risked violating the constitutive principles of the bourgeois public sphere: In place of one, they substituted the many; in place of disinterestedness, they revealed themselves to have an interest. Worse yet, women risked disrupting the gendered organization of nature, truth, and opinion that assigned them to a place in the private, domestic but not the public realm. Thus, an idealization of the universal public conceals the way in which women’s (legal and constitutional) exclusion from the public sphere was a constitutive not a marginal or accidental feature of the bourgeois public from the start.
From parallel vantage points, other feminist scholars have also challenged the presuppositions of an abstract, universal model of the public sphere. Mary Ryan queries whether “the olympian notion of a sphere of rational deliberation may be incompatible with genuine publicness, with being open and accessible to all.”21 She traces women’s entrance into public spaces in nineteenth-century America despite the strong barriers confronting them in the officially sanctioned public sphere. Yet, the pressures of social diversity meant that the public sphere was subject to powerful gender; race, class and regional cleavages. Anna Yeatman challenges the one-sided model of individuality on which universal citizenship in the natural rights tradition has been grounded.22 Nancy Fraser draws a lesson from several historical investigations of the public sphere, observing that because Habermas failed to examine examples of nonliberal, nonbourgeois, or competing public spheres, “he ends up idealizing the liberal public sphere.” Fraser observes that “virtually from the beginning, counterpublics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech”23 that bourgeois publics in turn attempted to block. She concludes that in both stratified and egalitarian societies, a multiplicity of publics is preferable to a single public sphere; and that an adequate conception of the public sphere would countenance the inclu-
sion, not the exclusion, of interests and issues “that bourgeois masculinist ideology labels ‘private’ and treats as inadmissable.”24
A question arises as to whether a universalistic discourse model can satisfy conditions of genuine equality. I have suggested that the virtues of universality and reason are offset by the role they play within a system of Western cultural representation that has eclipsed women’s interests in the private domain and aligned femininity with particularity, interest, and partiality. In this context, the goals of generalizability and appeals to the common good may conceal rather than expose forms of domination, suppress rather than release concrete differences among persons or groups. Moreover, by banishing the language of particularity, the liberal public sphere has jeopardized its own bases of legitimation in the principles of accessibility, participation, and equality. Last, I have argued that style and decorum are not incidental traits but constitutive features of the way in which embodied, speaking subjects establish the claims of the universal in politics.25
In complementary fashion, Seyla Benhabib argues that a range of distinctions in the Western philosophical tradition—between justice and the good life, norms and values, interests and needs—have operated to confine women and typically female spheres of activity like housework, reproduction, nurtu- rance and care for the young, the sick, and the elderly to the “private” domain. “These issues have often been considered matters of the good life, of values, of non-generalizable interests… and treated, until recently, as ‘natural’ and ‘immutable’ aspects of human relations. They have remained pre-reflexive and inaccessible to discursive analysis.”26 Iris Young also protests that “the Enlightenment ideal of the civil public where citizens meet in terms of equality and mutual respect is too rounded and tame an ideal of public. This idea of equal citizenship attains unity because it excludes bodily and affective particularity, as well as the concrete histories of individuals that make groups unable to understand one another.”27 In this light, we might consider whether Habermas’s ideal representation of the public sphere or his normative description of the subject are perhaps too tame to accommodate the dilemmas raised by feminist critics.