Nonuq – feminists are taking actions in the squo – the plan doesn’t stop it!
Higgins 2000 Professor of Law Co-Director, Leitner Center for International Law and Justice PRINCETON, A.B., 1986, magna cum laude HARVARD, J.D., 1990, magna cum laude (Tracy E., “SYMPOSIUM ON UNFINISHED FEMINIST BUSINESS: Reviving the Public/Private Distinction in Feminist Theorizing”, 75 Chi.-Kent L. Rev. 847, 2000, NexisUni via University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 7/13/24)//LFS – LMH In a sense, the reexamination of the distinction between public and private power proposed in this Essay is simply a call for more extensive feminist theorizing about the role of the state. Feminists [*867] must move beyond a critique of the liberal framework of state power limited by individual rights to a thorough reconceptualization of the relationship among individual freedom, private power, and the state.
This project has already begun in the feminist theorizing about personal privacy described in the first part of this Essay. Having revealed the ways in which traditional conceptions of privacy are either inadequate for or affirmatively harmful to women, feminists have begun to reimagine privacy rights in a way that might more fully realize for women the values informing liberal privacy. 88 Significantly, much of this work on privacy does not track the traditional public/private boundary but instead entails affirmative state intervention in the private sphere to alter the allocation of private power.
Although this work represents an important beginning, the business is unfinished. Feminists need to expand the project to encompass broader questions of the proper role of state power. What constitutes a legitimate exercise of state power within a well-functioning deliberative democracy? How should individual rights be defined against state and private power? What are the affirmative obligations of the state to intervene in the allocation and exercise of private power? How can power be allocated among institutions, both public and private, to enhance simultaneously individual liberty and equality? Bearing in mind these large questions will help to move feminist theorizing beyond a critique bounded by traditional notions of public and private and toward a possible transformation of the roles of public and private power in ensuring women's liberty and equality.