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 by Brian Milstein Submitted originally as a final paper for the seminar "Feminism, Theory and Critique," Spring 2002, at the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Ellen Freeberg, Instructor Cite as: Milstein, Brian. "Moral Critique and Symbolic Interaction: Augmenting Tronto's 'Ethic of Care.'" Unpublished paper, New School for Social Research, New York (accessed on [DATE] at http://magictheatre.panopticweb.com/aesthetics/writings/tronto.html). Joan C. Tronto's Moral Boundaries focuses on two arguments. The first argument is a critical argument aimed at demonstrating the inequitable effects of certain moral boundaries that have embedded moral theorizing since the eighteenth century. The second is a reconstructive argument that attempts to develop an ethic of care intended to correct or "redraw" these boundaries in a way conducive to a more balanced and equitable moral world view. While a full consideration of both arguments is necessary for a complete understanding of Tronto's position, the present analysis will focus mainly on the critical argument. Specifically, I would like first to reconstruct in summary her description of moral boundaries and their role in constituting our political, moral, and economic views of social life, then explicate how these boundaries affect how caring as a practice is integrated into our sociopolitical structure along lines of power and inequality. This will set the groundwork for the major part of my argument, in which I attempt to "augment" her analysis of moral boundaries, particularly the boundary between public and private, by employing the symbolic interactionist approach of Erving Goffman to lend additional understanding to the production and maintenance of what Tronto calls the "self-made man." Tronto's "ethic of care" emerges out of a historical and methodological critique of what she calls the "universalist morality" of modern philosophy. Contemporary moral theory, she argues, maintains certain "boundaries" that systematically deprive women's morality arguments from effective theoretic footing (Tronto, 10). She traces these boundaries to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, in which she notes a decline in the classical ideal of "civic virtue" in favor of a "minimalist morality" that disconnects the political from the moral (a), moral thought from moral action (b), and the rational from the sentimental (c). (a) According to Tronto, underlying the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment traditions in moral theory is a certain perceptual shift "from a hierarchical world view to a more democratic one" (Tronto, 31). Due in part to profound changes in the economic structure of society, the imperatives of social life and expanded interaction called for a paradigm of social thought able to overcome differences in goals, ends, beliefs, and modes of living. The result was a way of moral theorizing that effectively shed the more classical notion of "the virtuous life" in favor of a much thinner, rule-oriented idea of "moral conduct" (28-30). Such a paradigm that could effectively dissociate the right from the good would be more readily applicable to an economically-oriented body politic constituted as a population of divided labor and commercial self-interest. Additionally, the increased scale of day-to-day interaction seen in the eighteenth century onward gave rise to a broader notion of "public" (32-33). It is noteworthy that the new public realm, as Tronto describes it, grew out of the accelerating interactions concomitant with the increasing economic differentiation of modernizing societies. The implicit association of the public man (sic) with the economic man helped to remove the concerns of the polity from those of specific spheres of life, which, according to Tronto, established a corresponding boundary between politics and morality in modern social thought (34-35, 38). (b) Also consequential of the development of a broader notion of morality is its ability to circumvent differentiations among local customs, beliefs, and particular modes of living (9-10). The new framework must be universalized to the hypothetical everyman, theoretically independent of locality and context. The principle of the universalization of morality was to be human reason, and as such was to be unburdened by the contexts of particular human action (29). Rational morality was to be prior to actual life circumstances, and moral judgment was to be derived not from experience but from elementary principles of rational moral conduct. This separation of thought and action constitutes what Tronto names the boundary around "the moral point of view" (36). (c) Finally, Tronto traces the "demise of moral sentiments" as a function of "increasing social distance" (35-36). Tronto describes social distance in terms of the extent to which members of society can (or cannot) relate to each other in an understanding or responsive way (37). Tronto asserts that the new understanding of moral imperatives as being essentially independent of individuals in specific spheres of life allowed for a new form of individuation to the maximal point of an essential atomization of self-conceptions within the realm of society at large. Yet sentiment is by its very nature derivative of forms of life, and must be developed in experiences and their contexts. The increasing economic rationalization of society, of which this atomization is a part, meant that social moral principles were to be reconciled not with the sentimental life but with the logic of self-interest (49-50). According to Tronto, the matter of the development of sentiment was hence relegated from the greater realm of the public sphere to the ground-level unit of society -- the household (51). Thus, the separation of moral reason from moral sentiment ultimately reflects what Tronto refers to as the boundary between public and private life (cf. 10, 52ff). While Tronto lists these three boundaries as analytically concrete, it is crucial to note their dynamic qualities. The politics-morality boundary, for example, is not a solid one: morality, partly in virtue of the processes outlined in (a), is delimited negatively in relation to the political realm, and politics is, in turn, at least implicitly legitimized by moral justification (cf. Tronto, 92ff). It is in this light that we can see how politics surreptitiously determines the moral, such that the moral reinforces the activities of the political and, more importantly, the politically powerful. Tronto illustrates this point in her critique of Kohlberg's theory of moral development, which she believes correlates moral sophistication with sociopolitical status (93). This effect is likewise apparent upon closer look at the "moral point of view" boundary: the universal is determined according to the mainstream of moral culture, insofar as that mainstream draws upon the effects of a subtle interrelationship between a sociopolitical structure and a bounded morality. Furthermore, the very rationality that has been ascribed to the "moral point of view" (which is, to note, a phrase espoused by Kohlberg) suggests its own contingency in experience; Tronto writes, "The type of moral reasoning Kohlberg searches for is most likely to be generated by certain forms of education...associated with middle-class life in the United States, and other forms of privilege in our society" (95). The universal is in this way constituted so to correspond with the "socially normal," such that "those who are most successful and most adept in society -- those who are not lower class, those who are not 'minorities' or 'ethnic,' those who are highly educated -- [are viewed] as the most moral" (93). Finally, the boundary between public and private life provides an additional binding onto the moral sphere. Morality, as described here, is "public" morality, and it is precisely the public individual that is made the subject of moral reason. Care, feeling, and sentiment, being deemed outside the proper domain of reason, are relegated and confined to the private realm. Tronto describes the "engendering of moral sentiment" as a process by which women came to be associated with the sentimental and not the rational, which served to both "contain" women within the private realm and to mitigate the importance of their moral claims (52; cf. also 96). In the course of developing her ethic of care, Tronto delineates four "phases" of caring -- caring about, taking care of, care-giving, and care-receiving (Tronto, 105-108). Tronto argues that contemporary moral boundaries have systematically designated these phases to specific positions within the sociopolitical structure of society. Thus, caring about and taking care of occupy the "universal" domain of the more powerful (114). Caring about is, for Tronto, the "public" manifestation of the nominal willingness to care, and is the subject of public and political deliberation, and of reason (106). Taking care of is likewise a "public" activity resulting from deliberation translated into agency, and it connotes a certain mobilization of resources: a working man, by working, takes care of his family; the taxpayer, by giving money, takes care of public works; etc. (cf. 115). Caring about and taking care of make up those aspects of care that are not only accountable in terms of public reason, but can be realized through the media of organizational agency. Conversely, care-giving and care-receiving are generally relegated to the less powerful: Care has mainly been the work of slaves, servants, and women in Western history. The largest tasks of caring, those of tending to children, and caring for the infirm and elderly, have been almost exclusively relegated to women. While slaves and servants have often been employed in tasks of production, it has also been assumed that they should appropriately do the work of caring as well. Thus, slaves not only worked in the mines and fields, but also as house servants. (113)Care-giving represents the particularization of the intention to care -- it is care removed from the realm of the public and enacted in a context, with the care-giver in direct interaction with the care-receiver (107, 114). Care-receiving occupies a position different from the former three phases: in contrast to the modern ideal of the self-sufficient individual, care-receiving implies neediness, dependence, functional inadequacy, and even immorality. In sum, while caring about and taking care of represent the public, the universal, and the rational aspects of caring, care-giving and care-receiving represent the private, the menial, and the emotional aspects of it. | ||
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From the above discussion we can conclude that the tasks of "caring" are in fact distributed in society along the lines of power. This distribution of caring duties and, indeed, the very structures of inequality with which they have become associated can be traced back to the boundaries that Tronto believes constrain our present views on moral theorizing. The politics-morality, "moral point of view," and public-private boundaries shape our understanding of society, with the rational, autonomous, economic individual as its fundamental unit. Tronto makes the remark that "These 'self-made' figures would not only find it difficult to admit the degree to which care has made their lives possible, but such an admission would undermine the legitimacy of the inequitable distribution of power, resources, and privilege of which they are beneficiaries" (Tronto, 111). In this section, I would like to explore further how this "self-made man" is produced and maintained in contemporary society by drawing upon the symbolic interactionist sociology of Erving Goffman. Goffman is generally associated with the school of social theory known as "symbolic interactionism." Interactionists analyze social phenomenon on the general assumptions that people act toward things based on meanings that are attributed to them; these meanings themselves arise and change through various modes of human interaction that involve processes of interpretation (Craib, 87). Goffman builds his ideas on the premise that day-to-day life is like a performance, and the individuals involved in interaction do so by way of their "presentation of the self." According to this "dramaturgical" perspective, social expectations impel the individual to present himself according to how he [sic, for our purposes] wants others to perceive him (Goffman, 17). Individuals entering into interaction each project a certain definition of the situation through their means of communication and the expressions they give off. Goffman compares interactions to "a kind of information game -- a potentially infinite cycle of concealment, discovery, false revelation, and rediscovery" (Goffman, 8). As members of a common society, people are generally familiar with the forms of custom, demeanor, and decorum associated with particular settings of interaction, and so smooth everyday interactions presume a kind of "working consensus" among participants regarding what is expected of them and what they are to expect from others (9-11). This implies that interaction is, loosely put, a controlled phenomenon: events can and do occur that disrupt or contradict the definition of the situation, and so participants must take precautions to control their presentations -- perhaps even their environment -- as much as is necessary to insure against moments of potential confusion or embarrassment. Because interaction is contingent upon activities of revelation, concealment, and deception that are crucial to giving off a presentation of the self, Goffman identifies a "distinctive moral character" attached to projected definitions of the situation: Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way. ...[W]hen an individual projects a definition of the situation and thereby makes an implicit or explicit claim to be a person of a particular kind, he automatically asserts a moral demand upon the others, obliging them to value and treat him in the manner that persons of his kind have a right to expect. He also implicitly forgoes all claims to be things he does not appear to be and hence forgoes the treatment that would be appropriate for such individuals. (13)Goffman makes a distinction between "sincere" and "cynical" performances, when a person believes or is "taken in" by one's own performance or when one orchestrates it for some other motive than the one he gives off. A cynical performance may be given out of self-interest, but also out of a mere desire to be "polite" or when one's audience "will not allow them to be sincere" (18). In short, the fact that interaction as a "performance" always involves some manipulation of information does not by itself imply anything perfidious or "wrong." Smooth interaction is rather dependent on projections of the situation by its participants as a requirement of social life: everyone plays a "role" to render themselves intelligible both to others and to themselves (19). Key to Goffman's analyses in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life are the ideas of a front and front region, which pertain to "that part of the individual's performance which regularly functions in a general or fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance" (22, 107). A front refers to the expressions given and given off by an individual to project a desired definition of a situation, via a certain repertoire of "appearances" and "manners" by which the individual comes to regulate his behavior. A front region is an interactive space constituted in such a way to facilitate the successful definition of a situation -- this space may be real or virtual. For every front region there is usually a corresponding back region, defined by Goffman as "a place, relative to a given performance, where the impression fostered by the performance is knowingly contradicted as a matter of course. ...It is here that the capacity of a performance to express something beyond itself may be painstakingly fabricated; it is here that illusions and impressions are openly constructed" (112). The workings of front, front region, and back region become apparent when we think about theatrical performances. Actors put on a front when they are in the process of giving their performance -- we are led to see them as the characters they are portraying, the authenticity of which would we compromised were we to see them out of costume or reading directly from a script. The stage (the front region) is decorated and maintained in a certain way to facilitate the performance: we do not see technicians or stage-hands rummaging around amongst the actors. Such activities are kept back-stage, in the back region, to keep the illusion being presented in the front region; even the stage itself can function at times as a back region, such as prior to the arrival of the audience or after their exit, or at intermittent times during the performance when the curtain is lowered. The point is that these back region activities must be kept out of view from the audience to project and maintain a certain definition of the situation. We can make similar observations with regard to everyday performances, such as a waiter working in a restaurant with separate dining and kitchen areas, an office professional attempting to maintain a certain demeanor while receiving clients, or a teacher who wants to maintain an appearance of mastery over a subject matter while conducting class -- all these involve taking on roles while concealing the means of their preparation. These examples demonstrate how the basic principles of Goffman's sociology work at the "micro" level of everyday interaction. The argument I am attempting to make is that many of Goffman's ideas are also visible at the "macro" level when we speak of broad societal roles and divisions of labor. When we speak of "roles" at this level we refer to something much more fundamental, for we are dealing not simply with a situation or an interaction, nor of specific sets of such. Society in this context could be seen as a situation writ large, with an accompanying set of mechanisms that both permit and forgo types of interactions and various possible presentations of the self. One could in fact think of societal norms in this context as projecting a kind of "meta-definition" of situations, insofar as they lay a groundwork facilitating how a multiplicity of smaller situations are to be defined by their participants using a similar assortment of fronts and a common "working consensus." Goffman allows for this interpretation: In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on a meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. The front becomes a "collective representation" and a fact in its own right. (27)Of course, the scale and dynamics of a whole society operate differently from the "micro" level situations Goffman is most concerned with, and one must be cautious in making a leap of this kind. Unlike a situation at the "micro" level, a single contradiction in an everyday interaction is unlikely to disrupt the whole order. To be sure, there is room for a large number of individual discrepancies that still leave the general understanding of the "meta-definition" more or less intact. It is only when a significantly large number of people depart from the norm in the same way that society as a whole is affected; even then, it is highly unlikely that society as a situation will "come to a halt," but rather society will continue in an altered state. Thus, it must be remembered that we are dealing with ideal types, as opposed to situations defined rigidly as such. The issue I want to raise regards Tronto's critique of modern moral philosophy and how its fosters an allocation of caring activities along lines of gender and other forms of inequality. As we have seen, Tronto's four phases of care can be divided, in essence, into two pairs. The first pair, caring about and taking care of, fit well into the public domain and can be the subject of rational deliberation -- they are hence associated with the powerful, the white, and the male. Conversely, care-giving and care-receiving are consigned to the private realm, and are associated with the powerless, the dependent, the "ethnic," and the female. In this way, "care" as such has traditionally been relegated to the work of women and housewives, to servants and slaves who have generally been people of color, and to the lower socioeconomic strata of society in general. Tronto connects this division of labor to the moral boundaries, which she claims restrict our ability to discuss issues of care in the public realm. In this section, I want to consider the public realm as a constituted space for interaction among interlocutors who, in accordance with societal norms, must project a certain definition of the situation. The front given off by the participants in the interactive space of the public realm is what Tronto describes as the "self-made man." We have already observed how Tronto traces a development of moral philosophy (a) that implicitly identifies the "public man" with his economic role in society, with his status within a population differentiated according to the necessities of labor and modernization, and with his character as an agent of commercial self-interest; (b) that assumes a kind of "universal everyman," guided above all by his innate rationality that is valid prior to any particular context or life circumstance; and (c) that assumes a man that is "socially distant" in the sense that he carries his identity as an atomic individual, guided by reason and unburdened by "sentiment," which has been relegated to a discursively out-of-view private realm. Accordingly, the public realm is shaped for the free interaction of universal, autonomous individuals who are economically self-sufficient, functionally independent, and rational, i.e., unburdened by "lower" necessities that are emotional, bodily or otherwise menial; incidentally, this same "self-made man" is generally white, male, and middle to upper-class. We can think of the "self-made man" as a kind of front that the modern individual must give off to cultivate his successful performance in the the public realm, which for our purposes serves as the front region for this type of interaction. As this definition of the public individual is incompatible with the menial tasks of caring, they are necessarily pushed into a back region, the private realm. We can detect an implicit strategy behind the illusion of the universal, autonomous individual and his reliance on relations of power that consign the needs and interests of women, minorities, and lower classes engaged in caring activities beyond the public realm. Tronto asserts that "it is the enormous power of care that makes its containment necessary" (Tronto, 122). Care is essential, yet social standards of autonomy and self-sufficiency demand that signs of need or dependence -- physical or emotional -- be hidden in order to maintain the standard. As illustrated in Figure 1, the "self-made man" is able to project a corresponding definition of the situation as such by virtue of his care-giving support, the activities of which are kept in the back region; indeed, this reflects the ideal of the "nuclear family," in which the husbandly-fatherly male "goes out" to earn a living while the wife-mother takes care of things in the home and raises the children, and this is also the domain of hired help, domestic servants, nannies, maids, workmen, etc. This "regional division of labor" is geared toward the successful projection of the image of the "self-made man," and both reflects and reinforces a general division of society into public and private realms.  Jeff Weintraub believes that discussions on how to demarcate the world into "public" and "private" are "rarely innocent" and "often carry powerful normative implications" (Weintraub, 3). He argues that public-private distinctions are generally organized along two dichotomies, the first being what is "open, revealed, or accessible" versus what is "hidden or withdrawn," and the second being what "affects the interests of a collectivity" versus what "pertains only to an individual" (5). Thus while the idea of a "public" denotes a free and open space in which a variety of interactions may take place, it also implies an assortment of things that are definitively outside of its scope. "Public" and "private" are concepts with a profound moral dimension in that they authorize, prohibit, and deploy wide ranges of human activity; they also regulate social discourse accordingly. While the concept of "public" ideally refers to those thing which are visible and affect "the collective," it also allows for the predetermination of what is permitted to become visible and what may be recognized as a concern of the collective. In modern societies there are many definitions of "public" and "private," but the ones that concern us here are primarily those which associate the public with activity as an equal member of the body politic and with a space of free interaction within the community at large (7, 10ff, 16ff). Yet these prerogatives of individuals acting in a public are heavily informed by normative assumptions that presume the projection of a certain definition of the situation. Our very idea of living in a "civil society" rests upon ideals of individualism and competition, social distance, and interrelationships based on the model of the contract (Weintraub, 13-14). Society achieves its full functionality by virtue of an active public realm, such as that described in Hannah Arendt's idea of political society modeled after the Greek polis. For Arendt, this public realm was the engine that give society its life, its activity, and its effectiveness; its very existence, however, was contingent upon a sharp division between the sphere of the polis and that of the household. Arendt determines the private realm to be where people originally came together out of the need to survive and maintain: "Natural community in the household therefore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over their wants and needs" (Arendt, 30). The realm of the polis, the public realm, was where "freedom" could be exercised among equals; this freedom, however, was contingent upon "mastering the necessities of life in the household" (30-31). Freedom, here, meant not only freedom from command but freedom from the burdens of necessity. Furthermore, because freedom and equality are features of the public realm, they are virtually meaningless in the context of the private: What all Greek philosophers...took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of private household organization, and that force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the only means to necessity -- for instance, by ruling over slaves -- and to become free. (31)Thus, it is only by structures of inequality and coercion in the private sphere that the head of the household may emerge in the public sphere as a citizen who is free among equals.  The essential dynamics of the relation between the public and private realms as they operate in Arendt's view of the polis are illustrated in Figure 2. For Arendt, the very boundary that delimits the interior of the public realm was precisely the exterior of the private: The law of the city-state was neither the content of political action...nor was it a catalogue of prohibitions.... It was quite literally a wall, without which there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community. This wall-like law was sacred, but only the inclosure was political. Without it a public realm could no more exist than a piece of property without a fence to hedge it in; the one harbored and inclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family. (63-64)By this account, not only does political discourse fail to extend to activities taking place within the private realm, the very idea of politics is made possible only by the maintenance of a rigid separation. Further, we can see that the ability of an individual to take on the role of a citizen, of a public man of the polis, is only made possible by the existence of a hidden network of subservients to insure that his "dependencies" are attended prior to his appearance as a public man. The citizen of the polis is, by Goffman's definition, a type of front designed for a type of performance in the front region of the public realm; both the front projected by the "free and equal" citizen and the front region demarcated by the idea of a political community are contingent upon what takes place in the back region of the household. While we no longer live in the polis, numerous writers have demonstrated the debt that our present-day understanding of politics owes to it. The "rediscovery" of the Greek and Roman civic ideals is often cited in histories of political thought in the early modern period (Weintraub, 11). Even today, "the political" still carries strong ties to a corresponding idea of "the public," which in turn implies an indispensable counterpart in the idea of "the private." Tronto is, of course, not the first author to note how the public-private distinction has proven a barrier to the recognition of female subjection within the household as a political issue. The asymmetrical division of roles that traditionally permitted men to move freely between the public and private realms while at the same time confining women to the private realm, resulting in the "disappearance" of women altogether from the purview of political discourse, has been noted and explicated by feminist authors such as Carole Pateman (Weintraub, 31). Tronto's unique contribution comes from how she demonstrates the part this division plays not just in keeping women's experiences "hidden" from politics but in constituting the paradigm of moral thinking that informs what politics is in the first place. Thus, Tronto writes, "By the time women were able to voice their demands for a place in moral and political life, the boundaries to contain their arguments within a lesser, private moral sphere were already in place. The boundary between public and private spheres, and the presumption that moral actors must assume a universalistic, abstract 'moral point of view' made Anglo-American, middle class women's arguments for 'women's morality' ultimately ineffectual" (Tronto, 25). | ||
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For Goffman, the purpose of "everyday life" performances is precisely the normalization of appearances with regard to social standards; it is therefore only when the performance is "interrupted" -- i.e., when the illusion is thwarted -- that the dependence of the front-stage appearance on back-stage preparations becomes apparent. The presentation of self-sufficiency, autonomy, and universality by the modern individual is compromised should he be seen while burdened with the menial tasks of office maintenance or household life. Thus, the wife stays at home, the janitor only comes in at night, and the "self-made man" is free to engage in his "higher" purposes. While care may be per se excluded from the realm of the public and of moral reason, it remains crucial to the very integration of individuals into that public in accordance with the ideal of the "self-made man" underpinning our views of modern society. Care, which conceptually implies necessity and dependence, is contradictory to the ideal of self-sufficient autonomy upon which our greater moral paradigm and its correlative notions of "freedom," "equality," and "rationality" are based. Using Goffman's interactionist sociology on the logic of the presentation of the self in combination with Tronto's historical critique of modern moral thought, we can now see that the "self-made man" is located not in the a priori universal reason of the naturally free individual, but rather at the pinnacle of a historically constituted hierarchy of subservience, with care both contained and deployed as its agent. It is important to remember that the moral boundaries identified by Tronto are not so much the cause of such gender inequalities as they are obstacles to change -- they prevent women from effectively drawing the public's attention to the conditions in which they have historically found themselves. As Tronto has noted, the moral boundaries, and indeed the asymmetries that I have argued are implicit in the illusion of the "self-made man," do not by themselves necessitate that the inequalities implied be along gender lines; there is nothing in the structures themselves that automatically consign women per se to the private realm. To be sure, Tronto records how new questions regarding the status of women were frequently raised during eighteenth century, and how Enlightenment thinkers struggled to justify their confinement to the domestic sphere via arguments referring to their "constant sexuality" or to a penchant for the sentimental that clouds their ability to reason (Tronto, 52-56). Furthermore, the fact that the placement of women within these relations of inequality is, to a certain degree, "arbitrary" implies the possibly that such inequalities may persist even as women do begin to enter the public realm: "A feminist nightmare is possible, where some women succeed in becoming upper middle class 'self-made women' by requiring that other women, and men, from the lower classes, take over their caring work" (205n23). One must therefore note that the above discussions apply to general structures of inequality to which women have been historically subjected, and the emancipation of some women is not by itself a sign that the structures themselves are changing. Let me conclude by summarizing what I believe this theoretical excursion has accomplished. In the first part, I provided an exegesis of Tronto's critique of moral boundaries and how they effectively block the points of view of women, minorities, and other marginalized groups from entering the realm of moral or political debate. Using Goffman's interactionist approach, I then attempted to show the role these boundaries play in organizing society to correlate with the assumption of the rational, autonomous individual upon which modern moral philosophy is based. This "augmenting" of Tronto's critique intended to demonstrate how moral boundaries translate into everyday life practices -- specifically, how the distinction between a public and a private realm permits, via a "regional division of labor," the individual to give off the front of a "self-made man." This division of labor depends on the relegation of women and domestics to a back region, the private realm, such that the man can give a certain performance in the front region, thus projecting a certain definition of the situation as a self-sufficient individual in the public realm. Such an arrangement is not of course found in every household, and, with the progress already made in feminist initiatives, deviations from this norm of inequality are to be found with greater and greater frequency. This inquiry is intended to show the contingency of normative fronts and to demonstrate how they are formulated in day-to-day practice. By understanding the techniques behind the maintenance of norms of inequality, we find ourselves in a better position to redefine the situation, and so to institute change. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958. Craib, Ian. Modern Social Theory: From Parsons to Habermas, second edition. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959. Tronto, Joan C. Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York: Routledge, 1993. Weintraub, Jeff. "The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction" [n.p., n.d.]. 1-42.
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