(2018) 2 African Human Rights Yearbook 149 private or domestic sphere, associated with reproduction and the raising of children, and in all societies these activities have been treated as inferior. By contrast, public life, which is respected and honoured, extends to a broad range of activity outside the private and domestic sphere. Men historically have both dominated public life and exercised the power to confine and subordinate women within the private sphere. Although in principle the public-private dichotomy is meant to draw a distinction between the basic features of private and public spaces and the interaction between the two systems, in practice this distinction displays a gender dimension that disproportionately divides state power. As rightly observed by Sullivan, ‘the demarcation of public and private life within society is an inherently political process that both reflects and reinforces power relations, especially the power relations of gender, race, and class.’72 Generations of feminists have time and again underscored the gendered nature of this private/public divide.73 Sullivan, for example argued, that ‘economic, social and political power adheres in the public realm, to which women have limited access and over which they have limited control.’74 Put on a balance of scale, the public (the perceived domain of men) outweighs the private (the perceived domain of women), because of the centralisation of state power relations within the former realm. In turn the state becomes masculine, and that masculinity permeates its structures, organs, and processes, including the letter law. The private/public socialisation and engendering of society not only has left women, isolated from authoritative processes of governance, but has also resulted in the use and abuse of the power that the ‘public realm’ enjoys to suppress and control the already terse economic, political, and social powers, if any, of the ‘private realm.’ Charlesworth aptly apprehends this point in her observation, that ‘the assignment of women to the domestic sphere entrenches their inequality with men, for women are regarded as dependent on men for subsistence. Moreover the privacy of domestic life makes women’s concerns invisible and ensures the preservation of the status quo.75 In view of the stereotypical and disproportionate tendencies of the private/public dichotomy, one study has concluded that what is needed is a ‘re-conceptualisation of the public/private divide in a manner that incorporates the experiences of women’,76 but even such a reconceptualisation project may reinforce the inequalities brought about by the private/public divide, and further marginalise women’s already 72 73 74 75 76 D Dullivan ‘The public/private distinction in international human rights law’ in J Peters & A Wolper (eds) Women’s rights, human rights: International feminist perspectives (1995) 128. See for example, H Charlesworth, C Chinkin and S Wright ‘Feminist approaches to international law’ (1991) 85 American Journal of International Law 615; C Romany ‘State responsibility goes private: A feminist critique of the public/ private distinction in international human rights law’ in R Cook (ed) Human rights of women: national and international perspectives (1994). Dullivan (n 72) 128. H Charlesworth ‘The public/private distinction and the right to development in international law’ (1992) 12 Australian Yearbook of International Law 2. I Radačič ‘Human rights of women and the public/private divide in international human rights law’ (2007) 3 Croatian Yearbook of European Law and Policy 467.