Women as Wives, Servants and Slaves: Rethinking the Public/Private Divide

Extract

Critiques of the public/private divide in Western political thought do not go far enough in analyzing the full range and character of relations in the private sphere as demonstrated in this article, which analyzes John Locke's theorisation about the relative authority of wives, servants and slaves. A third-wave feminist analysis is used to illustrate the theoretical relevance of group-based identities that, far from having a uniform relation to the political power afforded to free (male) citizens, are hierarchically stratified. Thus it is demonstrated that a basic problem within second-wave feminist analysis of Lockean, and more broadly defined liberal thought, is the tendency to categorize women as ''wives'' of free citizens, and not to analyze adequately other dimensions of identity, thereby ignoring the explicit divisions and hierarchy among different groups of women in one of the earliest accounts of the private sphere in liberal theory.