REFASHIONING THE CONCEPT OF PUBLIC/PRIVATE

Lessons from Dress Studies

Carole Turbin

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s a veteran of the U.S. womens liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s, I welcome this retrospective on public/private because I have worried about the fading of a concept that was at the heart of secondwave feminists political project of revealing the nature and consequences of patriarchy and forging true sexual equality. The notion that the public/ private concept has been modied beyond recognition and has all but faded from view is more than an academic issue but raises fundamental questions about the future of feminism as a social movement. In short, does current feminist thought no longer reect the political project of secondwave feminists that inspired feminist scholarship? Feminist scholars who introduced the concept in the 1970s were drawn to explaining relationships between public (work) life and private (domestic) life because they witnessed shifting boundaries between home and work in the 1960s as large numbers of married white women entered the work force and the family wage declined. They theorized that male domination/ female subordination, the analytical equivalence of patriarchy, was structured by the strict separation of hierarchical spheres, male (public) and female (private or domestic). This division, taking on varied forms and ideologies according to time and placefor example, the cult of domesticity in the nineteenth century and maternalism in the Progressive Era in the United Statesbecame for feminists as central to understanding sexual inequality as social class was for economic and social inequality. But by the 1980s, many scholars realized that their original conceptualizations were simplistic. Responding to studies revealing that, for example, black women in slavery were at risk in the domestic sphere and most working-class and immigrant women expected to earn wages if not permanently then at some point in their lives, feminist scholars incorporated modications and complexities that reected contradictions, exceptions, and the multiplicity of subcultures, ethnicities, and races. At the same time, many feminist writers embraced Foucaults work, which, because it regards culture as imprinted upon the body, challenges the public/private dichotomy.1 As the public/private concept became more complex and intricate, it lost analytical and political clarity and became less central. Some scholars continue to use and redene the individual terms public and private, but most forged new perspectives reecting innovative modes of gender
2003 I NDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS , VOL. 15 N O. 1 (S PRING )

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analysis. Yet if we look forward at newly emerging conceptual territories, as well as backwards, retrospectively, new possibilities take shape. The new signicance of public/private life is related to other denitions of the dualitys terms that appear, at least supercially, unrelated to gender, such as public (government) and private (market) and the public of personal self-representation in sociologist Erving Goffmans Relations in Public.2 Some scholars in the emerging eld of dress studies build on the latter use of the term to reveal nuanced, non-dichotomous links between the terms public and private that incorporate hierarchy, subordination, and domination inherent in gender ideology. Their work has forged more analytically powerful denitions of public and private and reconceptualized their relationship, giving the concepts new relevance for current feminist scholarship and politics. It is not surprising that dress should contribute to a concept that was central to the origins of womans history, which explored the gendering of womens (and mens) lives from everyday experience to links to the economy, state, and culture. Clothing is always with us, literally carried about on our backs, consumed on a daily basis, and is one of the most consistently gendered aspects of material and visual culture, and thus often emotionally charged. Because both men and women wear clothing and were and are enthusiastic consumers of garments and accessories, clothing is ideal for gender analysis that systematically compares women and men (directly or by implication).3 Dress studies is interdisciplinary and scholars represent diverse elds, including not only womens and social history but also dress history, art and design history, economic history, anthropology, and literature. What they have in common is the material and cultural characteristics of the object and/or its wearer, either as their central concern or a touchstone for wider inquiry. They dene their subject as dress, which incorporates not only fashion but also everyday dress, including specialized garments, such as uniforms. They recognize that the cultural meanings of dress are even more complex and multilayered than other material objects because clothing and textiles almost uniquely combine production and consumption, and private, bodily, intimate sensation, sexuality, and fantasy with public self-presentation. Because scholarly analysis aside, everyone everywhere wears some form of clothing every day of their lives, and because clothing production is a dominant force in local, national, and global economies, dress scholars inquiries are international and multicultural, reaching around the globe. 4 Dress scholars link the concepts of public and private differently than feminist scholars of the 1970s and 1980s, who generally used the term private to mean domestic arenas associated with womenfamily, household, and immediate neighborhoodand characterized by face-to-face relations

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rooted in close personal and emotional ties, especially kinship. By public, they meant institutions outside the domestic sphere, usually associated with men, characterized by impersonal, hierarchical relations governed by regulations, especially employer/employee relationships in workplaces but also teachers/students, physicians/patients, and salespeople/shoppers. Relying on sources based primarily on verbal articulations, feminist scholars explored womens (and occasionally mens) actions, beliefs, ideologies, and less often, intimate psychic life, fantasy, and sexuality. For dress scholars, private is more specic, personal, and intimate, involving inner, psychic life (not unique but social, recognized as having meaning to others). Public is diffuse, referring to spaces where individuals and groups present themselves, consciously or with little or no awareness to others.5 Dress is ideal for exploring links between the private and public life because clothing is both tied more closely to personal identity than other material objects and is key to self-presentation. Because dress is not a simple cultural expression of society or individuals but a form of visual and tactile communication linked to the body, self, and communication, it is paradoxical and double-edged, both public and private, individual and social. Dress adorns the surface and at the same time masks and/or reveals (sometimes unwittingly) the inner psyche. Dress is inherently and simultaneously both public and private because an individuals outwardly presented signs of internal or private meaning are signicant only when they are also social, that is comprehensible on some level to observers.6 Studies of the social meaning of garments abound, but only a few recent studies, a relatively recent development in dress scholarship, contribute to this denition of public/private. They extend the term private to mean intimate in the sense of a concrete, material means of understanding public manifestations of inner psychic life and a range of bodily sensations, from pleasurable physical sensuality and sexuality to pain and discomfort. 7 Drawing upon imaginative studies of the social signicance of the private body, the meaning of commodities in a consumer culture, and the materiality of clothing and textiles, some recent dress scholars see attire, more than other material objects, as a window into understanding these intimate, bodily sensations. Garments are not simply decorative and/ or utilitarian surface coverings but constructions, often carefully, complexly, and ingeniously designed, giving shape and meaning to the bodies of men and women. Fashionable as well as utilitarian garments create a silhouette or look that have a particular feel to the wearer because they engender certain movements of head, neck, torso, and limbs, overall stance, and bodily gestures that create bodily sensations. Characteristics of fabric from which garments are made also contribute to the construction of the body and its movements, and have palpably tactile qualities of texture

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(nubby, rough, smooth) and drape (stiff, heavy, uid, uttery) that produce physical sensations, especially when garments are new. Thus, garments designed for public presentation of appearance (including undergarments that are partly visible or shape or construct the body) result in private, intimate sensations and fantasies that, in turn, have public, social implications. This perspective on dress expands the notion of private to mean intimate, emphasizing that private does not mean exclusively individual but socially meaningful, replacing the public/private dualism with a continuum or circular notion of public/private/public. The notion of garments shaping the body and engendering movements, gestures, and physical sensations is popularly associated with extreme examples, especially the tightly laced womens corsets of the nineteenth century, the twentieth-century feminine spiked heels, and seventeenth-century Chinese footbinding. To existing studies of how these garments uphold constraining gender ideologies, a few dress scholars add analyses of womens own perceptions of the physical, sensual experience and social meaning of shaping or constructing of their bodies. Historian Valerie Steeles pioneering work revealed that that many Victorian women experienced corsets simultaneously as sensuous (because they embraced the body) and/or as a protective shield. She later elaborated on twentyrst century womens playful enjoyment of the sensuous aspect of shoes that decorate and shape the foot and modes of standing, walking, and sitting.8 Historian Dorothy Ko explores social status gained by Chinese women with bound feet. Yet ordinary, everyday attire also produces private, often intense, sensations that have public manifestations and signicance that are hierarchical and gendered.9 Hats, for example, play a special role in public presentation because, whatever their obvious social meaning, they also draw attention to the head and face, a major focus of social interaction, and, depending upon construction, t, and fabric, inuence movements of the head and neck, sometimes upper shoulders, imparting a particular feeling to the wearer. In the United States, African American women typically wore hats in public long after white women were going bareheaded partly to impart an appearance of respectability, which for them meant the sensation of feeling protected from unwanted male attention, including physical assault from men who mistook them for loose women. 10 Even comfortable outts allowing for easy, natural bodily movements, such as roomy and rugged work clothes and the attire of casual Fridays, impart meaningful physical sensations to the wearer, encouraging movements and gestures appropriate to public and/or private situations for which the garments were designed and are worn. In this context, casual garments that do not restrict the body, conned to only one day, may safely (temporarily) modify gendered hierarchies by signal-

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ing more informal authority relationships and more displays of sexual interest. Some garments or components of clothing have special signicance for understanding how gendered identities are shaped by a combination of public and private dimensions because they are both highly intimate, directly or indirectly contacting the body, and a means of managing personal appearance for the purpose of public self-presentations. Dress historian Barbara Burmans study of changes in the placement, size, and contexts of pockets in Britain from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century reveals that this hidden and private segment of clothing, lying close to rather than next to the skin, serves to protect and/or transport objects of private or social (public) use, often revealing gender ideologies. Eighteenth-century functional but often decorated, capacious tie-on pockets lay beneath loosely constructed womens skirts, mens breeches, or other garments, depending upon class and occupation, carrying goods reecting the needs of their public lives and position. In the nineteenth century, as mens and womens garments became sleeker, tailors and dressmakers sewed pockets into garments, changing their placement, contents, and link to gendered private life and public appearance. Womens pockets were smaller, narrower, supplemented by small, decorative handbags, making it difcult to carry and access private contents, and signaling, Burman contends, middle- and working-class womens severely limited access to money and property. Because mens sewn-in pockets were designed for ready access to private contents, mens positioning of hands inside, outside of, or thumbs only inside the pockets became a signicant aspect of masculine gesture and stance in public. 11 Collars and cuffs (of both shirts and hosiery) also lie next to the skin, moving with or constricting bodily motion, but they serve as borders, transitional garments linking the private and intimate with public facets of the body. My study of mens detachable collars from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century in the United States and much of Europe explores the signicance of the visual and tactile aspects of a clean, starched, white linen border between the unclothed neck and outer garments. A man endured private discomfort of a stiff, white, freshly laundered, detachable collar encircling his neck in order to create the appearance (in the sense of pretense) of having a clean, private body, in an era when even middleclass people bathed infrequently and laundered linen only once a week. A clean collar was also essential to gender identity: middle-class manliness rested on afuence (including the ability to afford laundering costs), perseverance despite bodily discomfort, and upright posture and restrained motions of the head and upper bodyessential to an attractive, middleclass, white male.12 In sum, men wore white collars as a strategy to present

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to public observers an outward, material manifestation of private, intimate qualities, including bodily cleanliness and personal characteristics necessary for accumulation of wealth, maintenance of middle-class status, and attractiveness to appropriate women. Underwear, which lies next to the skin, contacting the most intimate parts of the body, is the most private of garments. The wearer is highly aware of the feel of the texture and drape of the fabric on and moving with or constricting the body, and at the same time conscious of her/his public presentation. Historian Jill Fieldss study of the transition from opento closed-crotch drawers reveals that, from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, womens undergarments were both public and private, and had two sides, eroticism and modestydichotomous aspects of sexuality that changed in relationship to gender ideologies over time.13 Eroticism and modesty are integrally related, two parts of a whole, because tempering or partially masking a public display of sexuality can heighten womens private erotic feelings and those of their observers. Eroticism and modesty are also components of hierarchical aspects of gender ideology, hierarchical in the sense of one component (public) exercising constraining or controlling the otherin this case, the display or acting out of private sensations. Thus, closed-crotch drawers were part of womens strategy of tempering private erotic sensations through modesty that is in part a response to fear of public disapproval or the potential danger of sexually stimulating male observers. As links between the public and private, intimate dimensions of clothing not only reveal the meaning of the most personal of physical and tactile bodily sensations but also provide a window into national, even global shifts. Problematic situations, with all their tensions and contradictions, often reveal ideological assumptions underlying social patterns. Especially during transformational periods, dress reveals aspects of ideologies linking individuals with societies that may be difcult to discern through other sources because dress is so closely tied to individual identity. In these circumstances, people may use dress systematically and self-consciously as a public manifestation, often including personal interpretations of beliefs and sentiments both through color, pattern, design, and texture of garments, as well as gesture, stance, and posture. Dress and textiles play a special role in emerging nations whose identity is shifting and contested. Powerful political leaders in diverse settingsfor example, India during the independence movement, early to mid-twentieth-century China, and interwar Italydeveloped fashion policies in order to forge, redirect, or shore up a tattered or undeveloped national identity.14 Studies of veiling in Islamic cultures and antebellum African American clothing reveal how key garments or ensembles become contested sites that are both fraught

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with intensely personal meanings to wearers and highly politicized national and even global meanings. 15 Just as tensions between public and private dimensions of undergarments reveal domination and subordination embedded in gender ideology, the relationship between public meanings of and private, individual attitudes toward dress in the context of emerging national or group identities reveals contests for authority and/ or control within nations and groups. The role of dress in such contestations should contribute another dimension of analysis to what historian Ann Laura Stoler calls tense and tender ties, intimate relationships between colonizers and colonized, male masters and female servants or slaves, and nursemaids and children that reveal the complexities of authority and inequity within empires. 16 This retrospective reminds us that it is important to look backward as well as forward, and that concepts retain their vitality by shifting in response to the opening of new intellectual territory. In a sense, the public/private dichotomy has come full circle. The analytical problem that feminist scholars wrestled with in the 1980s that led to increasing fragmentation of the public/private dichotomy was not so much with the concepts of public and private themselves but with separate spheres as a way of understanding female subordination/domination. Separate spheres divided the social world too neatly into male and female and viewed gender ideology in terms of situations in which male/female hierarchical relationships are obvious and concrete (family, heterosexual relationships, workplace, school, department store, and other institutions). The work of dress scholars suggests using public and private as an organizing concept that avoids the dualism of separate spheres while still shedding light on hierarchy within gender ideologies. Studies of dress that explore the private, intimate dimensions of the complexities of the relationship of garments to the body are a concrete, material means of revealing the shifting, ambiguous, sometimes elusive and provisional nature of the body/world and public/private/public relationships. Interpreters of the meaning of garments and accessories, including body modications, have only begun to reveal the new face of public/private/public, reecting feminist perspectives of the early twenty-rst century. NOTES
Many thanks to those who commented on this essay: Barbara Burman, Hester Eisenstein, Leila Rupp, Amy Gilman Srebnick, and Wilbur R. Miller. I am grateful to Gender and History and Blackwell Publishers for permission to use ideas previously published in Introduction: Material Strategies Engendered, in Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, special issue of Gender

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and History (fall 2002), 37181, and the book, Material Strategies: Dress and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin, (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2003).
1 Hester Eisenstein, Contemporary Feminist Thought (Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1984), esp. chap. 2. 2 Erving Goffman, Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 3 Christopher Breward, The Hidden Consumer: Masculinities, Fashion and City Life, 18601914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999). 4 Barbara Burman and Carole Turbin,Introduction: Material Strategies Engendered, Gender and History (fall 2002): 37181. 5 For a reinterpretation of the concept of public, see Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus: Critical Reections on the Postsocialist Condition (New York: Routledge 1997), esp. chap. 3. 6 Burman and Turbin, Introduction, in Gender and History (fall 2002): 372; Christopher Breward, Culture of Fashion: A New History of Fashionable Dress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); and Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago Press, 1985). 7 J. C. Flugel discusses clothing and bodily sensation in The Psychology of Clothes (1930; reprint, New York: International Universities Press, 1969). Joanne Entwistle (The Fashioned Body: Fashion, Dress, and Modern Social Theory [London: Polity, 2001]) bemoans fashion historians neglect of the body within. 8 Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 9 Dorothy Ko, The Body as Attire: The Shifting Meanings of Footbinding in Seventeenth-Century China, Journal of Womans History 8, no. 4 (1997): 1026. 10 Thanks to Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham for this information. See also, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African American Womens History and the Metalanguage of Race, Signs 17 (winter 1992). 11 Barbara Burman, Pocketing the Difference: Pockets and Power in Victorian England, Gender and History (fall 2002): 37778. 12 Carole Turbin, Collars and Consumers: Changing Images of American Manliness and Business, in Beauty and Business: Commerce, Gender, and Culture in Modern America , ed. Phillip Scranton (New York: Routledge, 2001): 87109. 13 Jill Boxbaum Fields, The Production of Glamour: A Social History of Intimate Apparel in the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming). 14 Burman and Turbin, Introduction, Gender and History (fall 2002): 378 80; Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (London: Hurst, 1996);

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Eugenia Paulicelli, Fashion, Power, and Gender in Interwar Italy, Gender and History (fall 2002): 537559; and Verity Wilson, Dressing for Leadership in China: Wives and Husbands in an Age of Revolution, 19111976, Gender and History (fall 2001): 60828.
15 Helen Bradley Foster, New Rainments of Self: African American Clothing in the Antebellum South (London: Berg, 1997); and Fadwa El Guindi, Veil, Modesty, Privacy, and Resistance (London: Berg, 1999). 16 Ann Laura Stoler, Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies, Journal of American History (December 2001): 82965.