Page 37 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

32 Jürgen Habermas

by women to the advancement of so-called ‘bourgeois publicity’. In
merely acknowledging the existence of a ‘woman-friendly’ salon
culture, Habermas is somewhat equivocal: the impression could be
given (inaccurately, according to feminist historiography) that the
‘public sphere’ was to all intents an exclusively male preserve to
which women were historical latecomers. In fact, whilst women were
denied offi cial access to the political public sphere until well into the
9
twentieth century, feminist historiography has highlighted the role
of women in the public sphere from the beginnings of the bourgeois
era: as participants in a salon culture actively marginalised by (and not
born of) a politically ascendant male bourgeoisie, and as participants
in publicly active movements and groupings involved, for example,
in the promotion of temperance or poverty relief. 10
Moreover, then, Structural Transformation exhibits a tendency,
which revisionist historiography cautions against, to portray the
exclusion of women from the official public sphere in quasi-natural

terms, that is, as if the exclusion of women flowed seamlessly from an
ideology of domesticity keeping them in their place. This underplays
the history of struggle and the extent to which women’s organisations
carved out a role for women which, though it may not have aspired
to match that of men, was nevertheless public. They were not simply
excluded from the male-dominated public sphere a priori but also
actively and coercively, through patriarchal relations of control
and economic dependency, and by the hostile environments of the
public-sphere institutions themselves: this level of analysis is largely
missed by the broad sweeps of Structural Transformation. Habermas,
we must remember, takes his lead from Marxian ideology critique:
he distinguishes between a set of eighteenth-century ideals and
11
their imperfect historical manifestation. But the question arises
as to whether Habermas’s reading of the bourgeois ideals is any
less problematic than his reading of the institutions and practices
that operated under their banner. Was the bourgeois public sphere
ideological simply because it was blind to its own contradictions or
was it, in fact, more overtly riddled with manifest confl icts, power
games and strategic thinking than Habermas allows for? Feminist
historiography, at least, makes the latter more plausible.
Structural Transformation also exhibits a tendency not only to
overlook the role played by women in the growth of ‘critical publicity’
but also to overlook the distinctiveness of that role. Like the working-
class publics, there were both convergences with and divergences
from the dominant male bourgeois model privileged by Habermas.

23/8/05 09:36:22
Goode 01 chaps 32 23/8/05 09:36:22
Goode 01 chaps 32