Uneasy Access for Women in a Free Society.

• Position: Review

INTRODUCTION

UNEASY ACCESS: PRIVACY FOR WOMEN IN A FREE SOCIETY. By Anita L. Allen. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1988. 226 pp. $68.00.

A dozen years ago, I published a book about women's privacy, Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society. I have been invited to revisit critically the central themes of my book in light of the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web.(1) In the preface to Uneasy Access, I observed that "[t]he felt need of recent generations to demarcate the limits of intervention into the privacy and private lives of women has done more than even the information technology boom to inspire analysis of privacy and the moral right to it."(2) My observation no longer holds true. Rather, since 1990, debates over information technology, communications, data protection, and the media have driven many of the most visible and novel efforts to understand privacy.(3) These new debates have had little to do with gender.(4)

The Internet and the Web were largely the inventions of men as well as government and private institutions managed by men.(5) However, today both men and women are designing cyberspace, and both men and women are using it. Like men, women use cyberspace variously to build and enhance careers or businesses, to purchase consumer goods and services for themselves and their families, to magnify and challenge their political voices, to educate themselves and the general public, and to enhance their social lives.

Moreover, both men and women are vulnerable to unwelcome privacy invasions in cyberspace.(6) Indeed, in major respects, men and women sail through cyberspace in the same leaky boat.(7) (We can analogize cyberspace to a vast sea into which spills the private data of those who navigate its swelling waters.) For neither men nor woman can assume complete privacy in the email of the workplace, in their travels from Web site to Web site, in their "anonymous" chat room conversations and bulletin board postings, or in the personal and financial data they disclose to companies with whom they do business online.(8) Neither men nor women have access to the encryption tools some experts say they need to insure the security of personal communications.(9)

Too little privacy in cyberspace is something of a problem for anyone who wants privacy, whether male or female. But too much privacy in cyberspace can be a problem, too. Cyberspace privacy (including anonymity, confidentiality, secrecy, and encryption) can obscure the sources of tortious misconduct, criminality, incivility, surveillance, and threats to public health and safety.(10) Since too little or too much privacy can be a problem for both men and women and their common communities, why focus on gender in cyberspace? A woman-centered perspective on privacy in cyberspace is vital because only with such a perspective can we begin to evaluate how the advent of the personal computer and global networking, conjoined with increased opportunity for women, has affected the privacy predicament that once typified many American women's lives.

In Uneasy Access, I set out the privacy predicament. Characterizing privacy as inaccessibility to others,(11) I argued that a traditional predicament of American women was too much of the wrong kinds of privacy.(12) Women often had too much privacy in the senses of imposed modesty, chastity, and domestic isolation and not enough privacy in the sense of adequate opportunities for individual modes of privacy and private choice.(13) I suggested that women are particularly vulnerable to privacy problems because they are perceived as inferiors, ancillaries, and safe targets and that women's privacy is sometimes probed by others who implicitly assume that daughters, pregnant women, mothers, and wives are more accountable for their private conduct than their male counterparts.(14)

Women's overall standing as equal participants in the family and in the economic and political life of our society has improved in recent decades. In this new environment, many women have the privacy that they want. They have experienced success in "overcoming inequitable social and economic patterns that substitute confinement to the private sphere for meaningful privacy."(15) They have learned to "exploit[] individual privacy without sacrificing worthy ideals of affiliation and benevolent caretaking to self-centeredness."(16) These egalitarian achievements in the final decades of the twentieth century could mean that women in the lately developed realm of cyberspace quite naturally enjoy the same privacy benefits that men enjoy and only suffer the privacy indignities that men also suffer.

However, women in cyberspace do not enjoy the same level and types of desirable privacy that men do. Women face special privacy problems in cyberspace because there, too, they are perceived as inferiors, ancillaries, and safe targets and held more accountable for their private conduct. In short, the complex gendered social norms of accessibility and inaccessibility found in the real world are also found in the cyberworld.(17) That privacy may be a special problem for women in cyberspace is an especially disturbing possibility since "women may be more concerned than men about information-gathering and their privacy on-line."(18) In Part I of this essay, I briefly review Uneasy Access, highlighting its central claims and contributions. In Part II, I provide some examples of women who have used cyberspace to attain certain objectives and discuss the role that privacy plays in the reaching of those goals. I conclude that the privacy of women in cyberspace is more at risk than that of men.(19) Some of the worst features of the real world are replicated in cyberspace, including disrespect for women and for the forms of privacy and intimacy women value.

Throughout Uneasy Access, I argued that women need and ought to have a right to meaningful forms of privacy and private choice. To that argument, I would now add that there is a need among women for privacy in cyberspace, too. I want to be careful not to overstate the sex-specific problem. Men online are vulnerable to privacy invasions just as women are. Moreover, some of the unique privacies of cyberspace work to women's advantage. Cyberspace is hardly heaven,(20) but it can serve the needs of women wishing to be left alone and of women seeking intimacy, commerce, and community with others.(21)

1. STILL UNEASY

   Uneasy Access proceeded on the basis of egalitarian, liberal, and feminist principles. I framed the central privacy problem confronting American women with a slogan: Women have had too much of the wrong kinds of privacy.(22) Women have had too much privacy, in the form of confinement in their homes and imposed standards of modesty and reserve; but they have had too little privacy in the form of opportunities for replenishing solitude and independent decisionmaking.(23) Until quite recently, many women in the United States were confined to the so-called "private sphere" of home and family in dependent domestic caretaking roles. Although these roles were sources of intimacy and joy, they were products of a social structure predicated on male domination and women's exclusion from most forms of civic, intellectual, and commercial leadership. Women who worked outside the home in education, business, industry, or the military were less isolated, but they, too, often found it hard to escape autonomy-limiting dependency and expectations of modesty and reserve. Moreover, women working outside the home were likely victims of privacy-invading sexual harassment on city streets and in the workplace.(24)

   Uneasy Access sought to identify meaningful, beneficial forms of individual privacy and private choice to which women could lay claim, consistent with the passion for and realities of community, family, and intimacy. The first two chapters of the book were devoted to engaging the small, analytically challenging philosophical literature concerning the definition and value of privacy. I urged that we think of privacy as modes of inaccessibility and noninterference and argued that privacy is potentially valuable for its capacity to enhance personhood and relationships. I also stressed the importance to women of participation in society as equals and up to their capacities.(25) The four remaining chapters of the book explored topical themes, chiefly, privacy in the home, privacy in public places, birth control, abortion, sexual harassment, rape victim publicity, pornography, and prostitution.(26)

   Today, privacy is more widely discussed among academics, policy analysts, and journalists(27) than it was when Uneasy Access was published in 1988. At that time, privacy was still an emerging concern. To be sure, federal and state lawmakers had been steadily expanding privacy protections for data and communications since the mid-1970s in response to threats posed by computer and surveillance technologies.(28) The federal courts were preparing for a fresh round of the abortion privacy debates and were being asked on behalf of employers and school adminstrators to consider less liberal interpretations of the "reasonable expectations of privacy" principle in Fourth Amendment cases.(29) Privacy concerns about the rights of homosexuals, surrogate mothers, and persons wanting to die were erupting nationally.(30) But privacy had less "buzz." Privacy was not so commonly talked or written about.

   Uneasy Access was among the first books about privacy to appear from the academy. It was apparently the very first by an American philosopher and one of the first by an academic in law.(31) Since the publication of Uneasy Access a number of philosophers have written books that devoted sustained attention to the meaning and value of privacy in its many, complex dimensions.(32) That Uneasy Access, one of the first books to devote itself entirely to the philosophy and jurisprudence of privacy, was undertaken from a...