Habermas posits that “public” and the “private” have evolved as unique, adaptive terms following the inception of their use in Greek everyday life; the re-definition of these words over the course of subsequent historical periods has been a) largely ignored and b) underanalyzed.
I took a few main points away from the 3 chapters of “The Structural Transformation…:” first, that the differentiation between the “public” and “private,” especially since the 1700’s, has been largely defined by the dichotomy between “belonging” and “seeming,” (13, sort of) or rather, the rights and abilities of an individual to participate in, understand, and associate with others. Who gets to do this? How, and why, and to what extent? Subtle shifts in access to the sense of individuality, largely caused by modifications to the economic structure, have slowly and surely created the sort of herd-mentality response to “culture” that we see today. He echoes his concern with the individual’s understanding of his place the morphing structure of “public” and “private” continuously throughout the essays, citing the “doubling of the private sphere on the higher plane of the intimate sphere…” (29), the new bourgouis concept of “accessibility…[in which] everyone had to be able to participate,” (37) the idea that one could, and should, be both “bourgeois and homme,” (55) (two complementary self-identifications that both relate to “being” as opposed to “seeming”) (Side note: Lyotard echoes the question of “access,” framing it in the discussion of language and knowledge via transmission of narratives, p. 20—his ideas about access to knowledge are of a more poetic nature than Habermas’s, though I think that both authors get at the concept that access is gained, in the new semi-public sphere, by actively asserting one’s right to that knowledge).
Which sort of brings me to my second idea, that public and private are largely terms of structure and organization (two words that are repeated incessantly throughout the essays). Public, in particular, is a function of organization: how do we decide to deal with the curveballs of economic ‘progress’? Fundamentally, it seems as though Habermas would say that the public sphere has processed itself in a way that streamlines its function as a structure-making machine which purports to organize itself and propagate societal rules that allow for the creation of the “individual,” “intimate,” or “private” space, or at least, the perception thereof (54), the dissembling of the family and the assembly of the world of jobs and production as the organizing principles of society (151-153), etc.

So: my final note: about halfway through these readings, I realized that I was very aware that any analysis of the female experience in the development of public and private spheres was…absent. Women may have engaged in a completely different and unique experience of “public” and “private” life. He mentions women twice in these three chapters, once to state that “rococo in general was essentially shaped by women,” (33) in contrast to the world of the salons and other locales of theoretical/intellectual discussion, and once somewhere in Ch. 5, which I can’t find right now. I find this to be a strange and glaring omission: a woman in England in the 19th century would certainly have had contact and interactions with a wide range of people and would have developed a very different perception of the “private” world than would have a man; being explicitly excluded from the rooms/areas/spaces of discussion, those strange interstitial spaces between public and private, forced women to develop their own, other, unique space, also outside of the schematic definitions of the public or the private. Where is Habermas’s analysis of these, equally fascinating and equally innovative, spaces?