Scott, Joan W. and Debra Keates, eds. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. 406 pp.

by Adriane Brown

Feminists have studied the separation of and interaction between the public and private spheres for decades. This issue has frequently been an intransigent dichotomy in feminism, understood in opposing ways that viewed privacy as either an important or problematic concept„on one hand, privacy was given as the justification for legal birth control and abortions, but it has also shielded perpetrators of domestic violence and child abuse. Going Public: Feminism and the Shifting Boundaries of the Private Sphere continues the discussion of public/ private spheres. Composed of articles originally presented at an interdisciplinary conference in Bellagio, Italy, in December 2000, this collection displays diverse views on this traditionally dichotomous split. Generally, these essays analyze feminist conceptions of the interactions between the public and private spheres from a variety of international contexts, including sexual politics in Iran, privacy in revolutionary China, disability in the United States, and prostitution in Thailand. Scholars from a variety of countries complicate the feminist dialogue, exploring the wide-ranging areas in which public and private issues commingle, coexist, and contend with each other, their boundaries constantly in flux.