A decade of turning and returning to The Human Condition didn’t help me square my view that the labor that sustains bodily life ought to be valued, and must therefore be seen, with Arendt’s claim that this labor wants, even demands, to be done in private.Īrendt calls the private realm “the realm of necessity.” The language is hers, but it’s a variation on an old binary theme, the song of necessity and freedom. Still, those claims about labor and the body have stuck in my craw since I first read her books as an undergraduate. I am a feminist, and I love Arendt’s work. The Human Condition, Rich wrote, was “a lofty and crippled book” conceived by a “female mind nourished on male ideology.” In her attempt to puzzle through the question of women’s work in contemporary life, Adrienne Rich turned to Arendt for guidance and found instead precisely the thinking that she sought to oppose.
And her implicit argument that what has traditionally been called “women’s work” should properly remain hidden and unseen is sharply at odds with the feminist demand that women’s activities be made visible, so as to be justly valued and compensated. Arendt alludes to this fact-she associates women’s emancipation with modernity’s diminished concern for hiding bodily functions, for example-but does not question, or even really pause over it. This cycle and woman have been defined in terms of one another. While human actions constitute history in linear time, our unending labor for biological maintenance swings in a circle, a ceaseless cycle. By contrast, the private is the shadow realm of necessity, where we labor to maintain our bodies and the life of our species. Being seen, people and actions are properly open to judgment by others, so as to allow us to decide issues pertinent to our life in common.
#Diogenes of sinope cave free#
The public is, or ought to be, the bright realm of free speech and action, the place of politics proper. In The Human Condition, Arendt argues that some activities are fit to appear to other people, and others not some belong in public and others in private. She refused outright to define her intellectual project in terms of her gender, and certain arguments, even her general view of social and political life, have been criticized as antithetical to feminist concerns. In the decades that followed, however, Arendt was largely indifferent to the politics of gender and sex. When Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition was published in 1959, the second wave of feminism was wind blowing across the water of American life-an energy that was gathering and palpable, if largely invisible. Against the statistical odds I went through with it, and came away from the labor with a bright-eyed newborn, busted capillaries around my own eyes, and a deeper sense of how privacy enables us to experience bodily life in its fullness. After all, there are only so many edge experiences an adult can responsibly pursue. Considering that up to that point I had greatly enjoyed the medical, reproductive and recreational benefits of pharmaceutical drugs, some might find my choice to forgo them in this particular pain-racked enterprise a bit ridiculous-yet a consistent logic motivated the decision.
Like many women with countercultural affinities and too much education, when I got pregnant I began planning for a “natural,” i.e.
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