The Struggle for Political Democracy: Emancipation, Gender, and Geography

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Abstract
The discursive meaning of places and spaces is central to configurations of power. The author focuses on the patriarchal imaginative geography which designates spaces either as public, masculine, and political or as private, feminine, and domestic, and argues that this is an oppressive structure of signification which limits women's identities and powers by denying them a place in the polity. The author concentrates on resistance by feminists against their confinement to the domestic sphere, and begins by briefly discussing their suffrage campaigns in the period before the First World War to enter and change the public arena. She then presents the lives of two interwar women radicals who overcame the public–private dichotomy in their attempts to liberate children from the oppressions of class, gender, and race, and examines the way in which their work offers a radical democratic critique of the state itself. Their efforts are compared favourably to contemporary revisions of the English polity by democratic socialists, and in consequence the paper concludes by advocating the destabilising and liberating effects of certain feminist critiques.

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