Reviewed by Kate Davies | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Kate Davies | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Kate Davies, Newcastle University

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. By Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 322 pages. $50.00 (cloth).
Through an impressive synthesis of critical material from a wide range of disciplines and some astute readings of political theorists from Adam Smith to Jürgen Habermas, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon has produced an intriguing and largely persuasive account of the relationship between liberalism and gender difference. The issues at the heart of this book have niggled at historians and critics as dissimilar as Ann Douglas and J. G. A. Pocock: the problematic associations of liberal civil society, privacy, and femininity. Douglas and Pocock have argued in different ways that their historic exclusion from the structures of liberal modernity offered women a backhanded source of power through the sacralization of feminine superfluity (Douglas) or the increased mobility and value accorded to privacy (Pocock).¹ Dillon is less concerned with the active agency of women, however, than with the constitutive role played by gender in the production of liberal fictions. For her, liberalism displays itself to itself by privileging notions of interiority, sexual difference, and sympathetic recognition, a process in which femininity is always key and not peripheral. Instead of explicitly questioning the divide between public and private or suggesting where to place the line between them, Dillon has refocused attention on liberalism's complex and competing accounts of privacy, from the meanings of the marketplace to those of romantic love. In the freshness of its arguments and its distinctive blend of critical approaches, The Gender of Freedom supplies a genuinely new perspective on the now rather overdetermined language of spheres and publics that has dominated eighteenth-century and American studies during the past decade.	1
Dillon's reinterpretation of Habermas is a particularly significant feature of her book and as such is worth discussing in some detail. After the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere appeared in 1989, feminist political theorists furnished important critiques of how a particular account of gender difference served as the unacknowledged guarantee of the ideal political relations of Habermas's bourgeois public. More recently, critics and historians have explored how the competing notions of public and private that underwrite his model of rational association make available spaces for the inclusion of the feminine in ways that are much more diverse and flexible than previously assumed. This is the central premise Dillon engages. She suggests that women are constitutive of, not contingent to, the liberal public sphere because of (rather than despite) their historic association with two different notions of the private: first, the sphere of intimate, domestic, and what Habermas calls "purely human" relations and, second, the literary-public as opposed to the political-public sphere (what Habermas calls "the world of letters").²	2
This claim may seem familiar, yet the way that Dillon approaches the question of the connection between femininity and privacy is both novel and interesting. She argues that within modern liberalism the domestic can be seen as a site of voluntarism rather than constraint, of freedom rather than necessity. The Habermasian utopia of rational-critical debate, Dillon suggests, is built on the notions of sympathetic interiority and voluntary domestic affection (principally heterosexual desire), with which women were associated. Because familial and domestic space came to represent a purely human retreat from the liberal-modern world, it was there that the foundational ideals of freedom first found expression. Refracting The Structural Transformation back through Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Dillon argues that Habermas's model of liberal subjectivity and political association is actually based on a process of sympathetic recognition, whose idealized origin and mirror is a feminized intimate sphere, the fount of modern sentiment, sensibility, and feeling. One might disagree with the case Dillon makes for heterosexual desire as the legitimating basis for liberal association, rather than (as Carole Pateman would see it) as what has to be rhetorically denied for the social contract to function, but it certainly represents an intriguing approach to the issue.³	. . .

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