Chapter Five shows how public and private spaces of discourse were contested in colonial Delhi. But a focus on boundaries between public and private has long been associated with feminist struggle, with women working to show how their ‘placing’ in the private or domestic sphere, as opposed to a masculine public sphere of political and economic activity, has been a key aspect of their oppression and exploitation. Lister (2003a, p 119) talks of ‘the historical centrality of the public–private divide to the exclusion of women from citizenship in both theory and practice’. However, this chapter examines these insights within a UK policy context in which citizenship has precisely been seen as increasingly linked to family and community (Rose, 2001), where indeed social policy could be seen as inhabiting the terrain of ‘women's work’ (Newman, 2009). This context is examined through a focus on the (gendered) lines between private and public lives among small groups of resident-activists, and the local officials with whom they worked on two housing estates in Stoke-on-Trent, UK. The chapter seeks to explore how these women constructed their activism in this policy climate and the ‘contact zones’ (Pratt, 1992) between officials and citizens in which policies are mediated. A particular focus will be on the work of both the activists and officials with local teenagers and their families. Overall, the chapter will assess how far critical feminist perspectives on the public and the private might need to be reconsidered in the light of this changing context. I will argue that in many respects the feminist critique of such a dichotomy remains salient and important; however, this is now being articulated in a new context that involves reconfigurations of male/female, public/private, and state/citizen categories.

After briefly reviewing relevant literature, I introduce the research setting and some of the overall ‘contexts’ in which the groups were operating. I then move on to focus on the work of both the groups and the local officials with teenagers. This aspect of local activism and of government intervention is examined as an example of a set of concerns that clearly brings aspects of private and domestic lives into ‘public’ arenas, and indeed could be seen as involving particular gendered positions, particularly as the activists drew on their experiences of parenting.