division of labor, her conception can in this respect be described as an ‘‘old’’
theory of privacy (Arendt 1989 ; Benhabib 1996 ; Honig 1992 ).
It is above all classical liberal theory, however, that postulates a necessary
link between a natural concept of privacy and a gender-speciWc division of
labor, and designates the household as the sphere appropriate to women.
Even though liberal theory since (Hobbes and) Locke has advocated equal
civil rights and liberties for all citizens, it has simultaneously clung to a
natural conception of privacy that patently contradicts the notion of equal
rights. This, of course, has little to do with nature and a great deal to do with
power and culture: seen in purely normative terms, nature provides us with
no argument why certain activities—or persons—should be considered
‘‘private’’ and others ‘‘public’’ (Ortner 1998 ). On the contrary, the division
isalwaysconventional in character, this being one of the reasons why new
approaches to privacy can call for a redescription of the private and refor-
mulation of equal rights to privacy and freedom that is no longer inconsistent
with the principles of a liberal democracy based on equal rights (Cohen 1992 ,
2002 ; Allen 1988 , 1998 ).
The natural and gender-speciWc coding of privacy singles out just one
aspect, one sector, from the whole spectrum of social meanings given to
privacy. The private is distinguished from the public in static terms, as
though we were dealing with clearly deWned domains (the private house
versus the public street) rather than dimensions or dynamic boundaries
drawn to determine what, for example, should be regarded as private in
public spaces (matters such as how I dress, or where I send my children to
school). The coding of privacy as something natural, female, or static, as the
‘‘household,’’ or a realm clearly and unambiguously deWned in opposition to
what is public, is, therefore, the old, traditional coding. As such, it is no
longer convincing in either normative or empirical terms.
3 New Ways of Thinking About
Privacy
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Along with this natural conception of privacy, the history of liberal theory
reveals another, fundamentally diVerent, connotation of the term. Since
new ways of thinking about privacy 697