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Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life1 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life1 Margaret Thornton Abstract: The idea of a distinction between public and private life has a long history in political thought, but the boundary between them has become increasingly blurred as a result of temporal flexibility. Technological change lies at the heart of the ability to choose when and where work is performed, including ‘working at home’. This refers only to productive work so that the unpaid domestic and caring work that women disproportionately undertake has been excluded. Its invisibility has led to it ‘counting for nothing’ in the computation of the Gross National Product. With particular regard to the gender ramifications of working at home, this article analyses the responses to an on-line survey conducted in Australia when lockdown was a key prong of the government response to COVID-19 in 2020. As unpaid work was integrated with productive work, it is suggested that the rationale for discounting it in national accounts no longer holds, especially as the sphere of intimacy is insidiously being colonised by capitalism. Key words: COVID-19, working at home, the public/private dichotomy, flexible work, technology, gender. INTRODUCTION: PUBLIC/PRIVATE SPHERES As Weintraub (1997, 1) observes, the public/private dichotomy has been a central preoccupation of western thought since classical antiquity. Hannah Arendt (1958, 45; cf. Long 1998), following Aristotle, argued that a symbiotic relationship exists between the public sphere, the realm Margaret Thornton is Emerita Professor, ANU College of Law, The Australian National University, Canberra. Legalities 1.1 (2021): 44–67 DOI: 10.3366/legal.2021.0006 © Edinburgh University Press www.euppublishing.com/legal 44 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life of politics, on the one hand, and the private sphere, or home, on the other hand. The public sphere has been invariably privileged over the private sphere, while nevertheless being dependent on it as the site of necessity where production and reproduction took place. The public sphere has long been viewed as the prerogative of free men, while women, children and slaves were relegated to the private sphere. Although the public/private dichotomy has never been politically stable, its gendered character has been remarkably resistant to change but I will show how it has been thrown into disarray as a result of ‘working at home’. Modernity saw the emergence of civil society, the realm of freedom, which signified the ability of individuals in their private capacity to associate, travel, worship, contract and litigate. Habermas (e.g., 1989, 27) complicated this ordering by including a new sphere between civil society and the state where private individuals came together to form public opinion, which he confusingly designated the ‘public sphere’.2 More recently, contractualism, industrialisation and globalisation have caused commercial and market-based activities to crystallise into a distinct sphere that is commonly referred to as the ‘private sector’ to differentiate privately owned businesses from those that are state-owned, but this economised incarnation of the private sector is quite separate from the private sphere qua household. Neoliberalism, with its emphasis on entrepreneurialism and profit maximisation has contributed to a further reshaping of public and private in contemporary society that has led to a dramatic increase in the significance of the market and the financialisation of the state (Davies 2015). Influenced by Hayek (1976) and Friedman (1962), neoliberalism has been concerned to re-establish the conditions of capital accumu- lation and the power of economic elites (Harvey 2005). The privatisation of public goods, such as utilities, welfare services and education, is a notable illustration of the shift in favour of the market. Indeed, so significant has the market become as a result of the neoliberal turn that William Davies (2014, 20) suggests instead of separate economic, social and political spheres, these constituents might now be evaluated ‘according to a single economic logic’. Davies did not, however, include the private domestic sphere in his reconceptualisation of civil society and the market. This sphere has remained comparatively stable since the early 17th century when labour began to separate from the household (Kumar 1997, 109). As productive labour became a sphere in its own right it became largely the preserve of men (McKeon 2005, 10), while the intimate sphere moved to the periphery and remained feminised (Habermas 1989, 152). Benhabib 45 Legalities (1998, 85) argues that the averred naturalness of women’s confinement to activities such as reproduction, caring and housework was designed to keep women off the public agenda in the liberal state. Pateman (1983, 281) shows that the devaluation of the private sphere, or the sphere of intimacy, and women’s assignation to it was the focus of almost two centuries of feminist critique (cf. Rosaldo 1974; Ortner 1998; de Beauvoir 2010). Feminist scholars also critiqued the idealisation of the family and the conceptualisation of the home as a ‘haven in a heartless world’ (Lasch 1977).3 They drew attention to the oppression and violence frequently experienced by women and children in the home, pointedly underscored by the well-known slogan of second wave feminism, ‘the personal is the political’. The gendered nature of the public/private dichotomy has therefore not only had ‘a pernicious effect on women, but it has also had the effect of sequestering men from full participation in the life of the family’ (Long 1989). In recent years, however, ‘the personal is the political’ has receded in importance in feminist discourse (Armstrong and Squires 2002, 265; Higgins 2000) and the ‘lofty disdain’ formerly displayed by mainstream critics towards the private sphere has been replaced with the ‘warm glow of opprobrium’ (Kumar 1997, 205), invoking language that continues to resonate with family, place and identity (Margaret Davies 2014, 154–155). I am interested in the way technological change has directly challenged the traditional separation between public and private life, bringing with it not only a blurring of the boundary, but a growing consciousness of the accelerating pace of life (Wajcman 2015). Indeed, as a result of the expectation that everyone should be connected, Turkle (2011, 152) suggests that we are ‘all cyborgs now’ as a result of the infiltration of technology into our lives (see also Thornton 2016b). This has been insidious, beginning innocently enough with responses to the occasional email, but expanding to full-time virtual work. The injunction to work at home as a result of COVID-19 has accelerated this imperative, thereby inviting questions about the status of the private sphere and the home in liberal theory as it becomes increasingly economised. In this article, I show first how the feminisation of wage labour, in conjunction with technological change, paved the way for the inclusion of the private sphere in a single economic logic. Flexible work could be regarded as the first step, although this is not to discount the piecework long undertaken by women in the home. The injunction for all workers to work at home who were able to do so due to the pandemic was an even more significant step in the economisation of the private sphere. 46 Coronavirus and the Colonisation of Private Life I consider the impact of working at home by drawing on 260 anon- ymous responses to an Australia-wide on-line survey (the Coronavirus Survey) completed between May and September 2020 when business and inessential services were ordered to be locked down as a result of COVID- 19.4 Permission to administer the survey was obtained from the Australian National University.5 The survey was directed at employed persons, both male and female, (full-time, part-time, casual or self-employed) who were working at home. Although the survey was not restricted to a particular industry, occupational group or region in Australia, the ability to work at home is generally dependent on computerised technology, which signifies the white-collar and professional character of respondents; workers such as those engaged in the service sector of the economy were necessarily precluded from working at home. Respondents were asked questions regarding their gender, employ- ment status, composition of household, share of domestic and caring responsibilities undertaken, as well as conditions and hours of work. Because I was particularly interested in the impact of working at home on respondents’ intimate life, provision for open text was designed to facilitate more nuanced responses than merely ticking a box. While the survey was conducted in Australia, the gendered experiences of working at home during lockdown have been replicated in many other parts of the world (e.g., Boncori 2020; Vohra & Taneja 2020). THE FEMINISATION OF WAGE LABOUR I turn first to the feminisation of wage labour, a world-wide phenomenon since the latter part of the 20th century, which laid the groundwork for the colonisation of the private sphere by the economy because it encouraged temporal flexibility as to when and where work might be performed (Hardt and Negri 2009, 132). As women moved into the paid workforce in substantial numbers, they sought flexibility because they were also expected to take primary responsibility for domestic work and the preparation of meals, as well as caring for children and family members unable to care for themselves. Employers, however, have traditionally evinced a preference for workers unencumbered by private sphere responsibilities in order that they might devote themselves unconditionally to work. These ‘ideal workers’ assume a necessarily masculinist character as they take ‘little or no time off for childbearing or child-rearing’ (Williams 2000, 1). While it was always the hope of the women’s movement that fathers would play a more active role in child- care, this has not been realised in other than a minimal sense (Thornton 2020; Collier 2019; Atkinson 2017; Brandth and Kvande 2016).
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