public private affairs

[hsi_feng]

The public as an immoral domain meant rather different things to women and men. For women, it was where one risked losing virtue, dirtying oneself.... The public and the idea of disgrace were closely allied. The public for a bourgeois man had a different moral tone. By going out in public, or “losing yourself in public,” as the phrase occurred in ordinary speech a century ago, a man was able to withdraw from those very repressive and authoritarian features of respectability which were supposed to be incarnate in his person, as father and husband, in the home. So that for men, the immorality of public life was allied to an undercurrent of sensing immorality to be a region of freedom, rather than of simple disgrace, as it was for women. For instance, in the restaurants of the 19th Century, a lone, respectable woman dining with a group of men, even if her husband were present, would cause an overt sensation, whereas the dining out of a bourgeois man with a woman of lower station was tacitly but studiously avoided as a topic of conversation among any of those near to him. For this same reason, the extramarital liaisons of Victorian men were sometimes conducted more publicly than one would in retrospect imagine, because they occurred in a social space which continued to be far away from the family; they were “outside,” in a kind of moral limbo.

--The Fall of Public Man Richard Sennett