Publicity, Privacy, and Women's Political Action

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Abstract
Interpretations of women's activism depend on the ways in which analysts conceptualize the relations between privacy, publicity, and politics, in this paper the relationship between women's standing in the public sphere and their activism is problematized. Women's activism is shaped by strategic, and sometimes opportunistic, choices to locate their activism either in public or in private spaces. These choices point to the importance of reconceptualizing publicity and privacy in ways that separate the content of actions from the spaces in which action is taken. Such a distinction creates the possibility of taking private actions into public spaces and of taking public actions in private spaces. When the content of action is separated from the spaces of action, women's activism is evaluated in terms of the efficacy of various actions in either public or private spaces, rather than in terms of women's presumed lack of access to the public sphere.