Page 38 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 33

For example, women’s moral-reform groups would often draw on,
rather than exclude, putatively ‘private’ values of domesticity and
the care ethic. In other words, women were not only challenging
exclusionary forces in order to participate in public life: they were
also implicated in a struggle over the very meaning of publicity, and
the nature of the boundaries between public and private. As we shall
see later, this historical dispute goes to the heart of contemporary
issues for the democratic imagination.
What all this points to, then, is a narrative in Structural
Transformation which sits rather uncomfortably with an array of
feminist scholarship. The image of women as relative latecomers
is problematic, particularly when combined with a ‘fall from grace’
narrative in which women are only admitted to the public sphere
at a time when its positive attributes have been all but lost under a

torrent of massification. Mary Ryan, for example, counters the view

that the admission of women to the official public sphere was simply
part of that trade-off between democratic expansion and degradation.
Women have not only been active in the shaping of modern publicity,
but have also engineered certain key qualitative gains in the nature
of democracy through, for example, achievements in expanding the
political agenda to include sites of power that were once ‘private’
issues, such as the family and poverty. Women’s eventual admission

to the ‘official’ public sphere ‘cannot be ironically dismissed with the

painful observation that when women finally won the franchise and

official access to the public, they found themselves the conquerors of
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a hollow fortress’. For all the regressive transformations the public
sphere may have undergone, it is important to emphasise not only
that women played a role in building that fortress, but also that it’s
distinctly less hollow than it would have been had they not battled
their way in.

Habermas’s emphasis on a very specific social group – the male,
property-owning classes – is undoubtedly connected to his emphasis
on a novel social formation – modern capitalism – and the new
relationships between state and society, politics and economics,
which it embodied. It is, then, legitimate to question whether or not
Habermas’s narrative suffers the burden of those ‘historical blinkers’
which post-Marxist thought has taught us to associate with reductive,
economistic readings of history. Such questions of methodology
relate not only to the role played by social groups other than the male
bourgeoisie, but also to the role of historical dynamics other than what
Marx saw as the self-propelling juggernaut of capitalist accumulation.

23/8/05 09:36:22
Goode 01 chaps 33
Goode 01 chaps 33 23/8/05 09:36:22