Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought

1981

In this her first major work, Jean Bethke Elshtain, offers her own unique contribution to feminist theory by attempting to reconstruct a conception of the public and the private. She uses the Western philosophical canon together with the work of some contemporary feminists to question the general tendency to assert the primacy of the public world (or the political sphere which is dominated by men) and to denigrate the private world (or the familial sphere which is dominated by women). Instead she hopes to reaffirm an order in which the importance of the family is envisioned as an ‘ethical polity’.

Table of Contents
Preface: On Thinking and Nastiness
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Public and Private Imperatives
Part I - Public and Private Images in Western Political Thought
1 Politics Discovered and Celebrated: Plato and the Aristotelian Movement
2 The Christian Challenge, Politics' Response: Early Christianity to Machiavelli
3 Politics Sanctified and Subdued: Patriarchalism and the Liberal Tradition
4 Politics and Social Transformation: Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx on the Public and the Private
Part II - Contemporary Images of Public and Private: Toward a Critical Theory of Women and Politics
5 Feminism's Search for Politics
6 Toward a Critical Theory of Women and Politics: Reconstructing the Public and Private

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Reviews

> David Martin, “Martin Review: Public Religions in the Modern World ”