"Public Man, Private Woman" by Jean Elstein Publisher: Life·Reading·New Knowledge Sanlian Bookstore

Introduction · · · · · ·
A profound history of gender thought, dedicated to modern women who have nowhere to settle between public and private

This book systematically explores and summarizes the women's issues in Western society and political thought. Although it was written in the 1980s, the issues it focuses on and discusses are still cutting-edge. In modern Chinese society, social contradictions such as fertility, sexual relations, preference for boys over girls, marital relations, and mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relations are all unwilling to take advantage of women's rights and feminism. The label-making debate between each other is even more common. Although domestic feminism and feminist consciousness have risen rapidly, they are "pretended to be born". So in the face of "feminism" in today's Chinese society, we need to get back to the source. It is necessary to ask what feminism is? Where does its original ideological resources come from? How should it be placed in today's Chinese society? What should attract our attention most in Elstein's book is her deep reflection on all feminist ideas.

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 The masterpiece of Jean Elstein, a famous political thinker

 Reflect on contemporary feminism and reconstruct the boundaries between public and private

Male and female, public and private are two pairs of contradictory and highly tense keywords in the tradition of Western political thought. Gender studies and identity politics research have been flourishing in the field of Western intellectual history since the 20th century, but attempts to sort out the history of thought from a feminist perspective are very rare.

The author of this book, Jean Elstein, is an expert in the study of women and politics in the American intellectual community. She has won numerous honors throughout her life, including the "Guggenheim Scholar" and the "Goodnow Prize" of the American Political Science Association. In this book, she takes a broad perspective of the history of thought and the division of the public and private spheres as the basic point. She carefully sorts out the "view of women" in the West from the classical era to the 20th century, presenting the views of thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, St. Thomas, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx and others on women's issues, and comments on the feminist schools of thought such as radicalism, liberalism, Marxism and psychoanalysis that were born in the 20th century and are based on traditional Western thought; not only focusing on the ideological derivatives after the birth of feminism, but also tracing the problem back more deeply, exploring the traditional ideological clues that helped the germination, shaping and evolution of feminist thought. In the end, Elstein expressed her moderate position relative to radical feminism. She believes that the essence of the women's liberation movement should not be an absolute transition from the private to the public sphere, but to enable women to "become people who have the ability to reflect and act in both spheres."

About the Author
Jean Bethke Elshtain (1941-2013), a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a famous critic, political philosopher and public intellectual. She is well-known in the fields of religion, politics, ethics and so on. She has won numerous honors in her life, including "Guggenheim Scholar" and "Goodnow Prize" of the American Political Science Association. She was the Rockefeller Professor of Social and Political Ethics at the University of Chicago Divinity School and also taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She has written works such as Women and War; Just War Theory; Democracy on Trial, and "Public Men, Private Women: Women in Social and Political Thought" is her famous work.