Abstract
In this chapter I will show how and why it is helpful to triangulate, or supplement, the private-public binary with a third spatial category, the sacred, if we want to understand the space of female speech, agency and activity in the past. In particular, Graeco-Roman Antiquity had more fine-masked categories of gender and space than our modern period. Sacred space was not identical to public space nor any part or subfield of public space, but had its own specific meaning, structure, and position in the socio-cultural order. This argument troubles and undermines the received opposition between public male space and private female space.
I will use ‘private-public’ as the main designation of the binary in question. In my own work, I have often preferred more pragmatic categories (‘domestic’ space instead of ‘private’), just as Joan Scott does (‘familial’ instead of ‘private’). But the degree of semantic overlap with the much more frequently used terms for these spaces, ‘private’ and ‘public’, means that deviating terms are more variations of a theme than genuinely new categories.