• Feminists are concerned about the public/private divide because of its role in upholding sexual inequality. Patriarchy operates through a sexual division of labour, through which women have traditionally been excluded from the ‘public’ sphere of work, art and politics, and been confined to an essentially ‘private’ sphere centred on family and domestic responsibilities. Feminists have therefore sought to challenge the divide between ‘public man’ and ‘private woman’.

However, feminists have not always agreed about what it means to break down the public/private divide. Radical feminists have been its keenest opponents, arguing that the ‘personal is the political’. They have sought to fundamentally reconstruct family, domestic and personal life, in the belief that this would make patriarchal oppression in the public sphere unsustainable. For liberal feminists, these issues are of less central concern.