Tiessen refers us to a series of talks that Livesay prepared in the 1950s for the program . Here Livesay talks back to the CBC programmers, making programming suggestions from the point of view of a mother and, in her own words, a housewife. Like most housewives, she says in one 1951 address, I am more frequently a daytime than an evening listener. And in looking back over the year’s daytime programs it is impossible not to say: What a good friend the radio was to me (10).

The radio in this account visits the isolated housewife during her lonely hours and refrains from judging her unfinished chores. Livesay carefully positions herself as a representative of the domestic, feminine, consumer of radio; this is the very figure that looms large for many contemporaneous intellectuals as representative of the pacifying effects of mass media. Contradicting these assumptions about the interests of the housewife, Livesay asks for the CBC to block together its highbrow offerings so that they might be more easily found. In a 1952 discussion of CBC dramas, she expresses her excitement for a production of A.M. Klein’s .

She is not, however, merely asking for a higher level of programming from the CBC; rather, she advocates for the CBC to take a place as a truly public and interactive medium. For example, echoing her ongoing concern with documentary, she argues for actuality broadcasts to connect citizens across Canada ( 12). This desire for access to the CBC as a public medium is expressed in tandem with a desire for the distribution of highbrow art and literature; it is public, but not populist. This is a distinction that still has much to offer current discussions about CBC programming. In these brief talks, Livesay paints a picture of the housewife as not a mere passive consumer but as an engaged participant in a public conversation—indeed, as potentially an intellectual.

Are we to take this housewife identification as anything other than ironic given that Livesay’s ambitious and politically passionate documentary poem was first broadcast on the CBC just a few years earlier in 1949, and again in 1952? We might keep in mind Livesay’s ongoing struggle with the CBC to get her work on air. Peggy Lynn Kelly shows that Livesay’s literary style, departing from the CBC’s preferred dramatic realism and straight narrative, was a major obstacle in this relationship. Livesay’s housewife may be seen as a pose that allows her to communicate her ideas about public engagement and formal experimentation.

Yet, in this period, Livesay was a housewife. In her memoir , the period is treated only briefly, as a time of retreat from public life: The war and having children changed all my perspectives: from being a participant in the struggle for a better world I became an observer. All community efforts narrowed down to that of the home (174). Livesay also paints an image of this time as one of retreat in : Our solution was to withdraw, settle down to family life on the North Shore (278). In the wake of the dissolution of the radical Left during the Second World War, Livesay claims that she substituted the suburbs and domestic retreat for political engagement. The representation of this time in Livesay’s life as one of domestic retreat between her publicly engaged work of the 1930s and from the 1960s on has become pervasive.

Despite this perceived preoccupation with domestic life, Livesay was in fact remarkably artistically and intellectually productive during the years in which she raised young children. In addition to the broadcasting of , Livesay was awarded two Governor General’s awards, wrote fiction, poetry, and radio texts, reported for the and participated in the founding of . But was her work publicly engaged, or part of a general retreat from political and public concerns? I argue that, in her years of domestic retreat, Livesay continues to be concerned with the public sphere. It is through her mobilization of the figure of the housewife that I wish to think about how this public appears in Livesay’s work of this period.

Theories of the public have, of course, a longer history than I will be able to articulate here; however, I will offer a couple of views of the relationship of the intellectual to the public that might be useful in thinking about what Livesay accomplishes with her housewife figure.

Following Russell Jacoby’s popularization of the term public intellectual in his 1987 book , much thinking about the relationship of the intellectual to the public has taken for granted that a public intellectual takes on a partisan (usually, but not always, Left) and populist approach to intellectual work, in contrast to, say, the academic intellectual. Jacoby identifies a lost generation of public intellectuals: the baby boom generation, whose Marxist politics were effectively consumed by their academic success. The term public intellectual has circulated beyond Jacoby’s original thesis to include a number of intellectuals speaking directly to a non-academic audience, frequently on topics relating to public life.

It is worthwhile, then, to remember that as recently as the 1950s, when Livesay was producing her talks, the intellectual was almost centrally defined by a lack of partisan passions. This view of the intellectual frequently employed the term disinterest in describing the ideal function of the intellectual. This is the disinterest that we know best in English literary scholarship through Matthew Arnold, the origins of which can be found in Emmanuel Kant. In written in 1784, Kant attempts to designate the private and public rights and responsibilities of the intellectual. For Kant, the freedom of original thought allowed for by the Enlightenment comes with a limit on the expression of that thought; it belongs purely to the public realm. Thus, the intellectual has a split function. For example, a clergyman has responsibilities to his congregants and must, in that capacity, reflect the values and beliefs of the church he represents. In his capacity as a scholar, however, he must enjoy an unlimited freedom to use his reason. His actions as a free intellectual are bound with the public nature of intellectual discourse. Significantly, Kant describes the intellectual’s sphere of limitation as domestic (in the German, Hausliche). Insofar as the intellectual has any institutional responsibilities, he is not free, and his thought is not protected as legitimately public. Here there is a division between the domestic and the public. The public is the realm of disinterested freedom; the domestic is the realm of partiality and institutional responsibility.

Skipping ahead to 1958, Hannah Arendt, in elaborates extensively on the view, espoused by Kant, that the public role of the intellectual is defined by disinterest, suggesting a lineage for this conception of the public that begins in ancient Greece. In Arendt’s schema, human affairs can be grouped into three realms: the public, the private, and the social. For the Greeks, the public realm was a neutral space; its antithesis is the domestic. Whereas the home contends with necessity, the public allows freedom from material necessity. The domestic is where women, children, and slaves contend with the animal business of life; the public is where man achieves agency and acts freely. The key idea for Arendt is that the domestic is inherently concerned with what we have come to call interest, and the public is only truly public to the extent that it is free from interest. That much of what we understand as the public realm today is constituted by warring interests is a sign of the impoverishment of our conception of the public. In fact, we no longer have much of a public, according to Arendt, but rather a new realm—the social. The social is defined by the introduction of the material concerns, traditionally belonging to the household, into public discourse. The domination of politics by economics attests to this ascension of necessity and the material.

I’ve necessarily condensed this trajectory of thought about the nature of the public, the private, and the social. Key to my reading of Livesay, however, is the opposition between the domestic and the public, and the alignment of the intellectual’s project with the public, which is thought to be a disinterested site. It is in this context that I am interested in Livesay’s mobilization of the figure of the housewife at this point in her career.

Writing in the 1950s, Livesay poses a challenge to the split between the domestic and the public before the second wave of the feminist movement does so in a more overtly theorized fashion. In positioning the housewife as the listener who transmits, that is to say, produces programming for the CBC, Livesay challenges the conception of the domestic, and the feminine, as passive receptacle of mass media. Livesay seems keenly aware of the limits on women’s intellectual engagement in this time. Consequently, she uses the image of the housewife to leverage her way into broadcast, to keep doing what she was already doing in the 1930s and would continue doing after the rise of second-wave feminism and the new Left: engage wholeheartedly in public discourse.

To see this leveraging in action, we might look at Livesay’s written to be broadcast through the CBC for a European audience on New Year’s 1953 (). Here she argues for a Canadian arts policy that would provide support for cultural production, suggesting the building of a functional and funded national arts council, a working and representative authors’ association, and the institutional machinery necessary to represent Canada properly to UNESCO. The larger context of these concerns is a humanist argument for the arts as a source of connection in an increasingly alienating world. In this talk, not only is Livesay engaging publicly but she is also foregrounding the public context and public role of the writer. A significance of this rapid movement from housewife to, one might say, public intellectual, is that it directly contradicts the opposition between the private and the public that has been central to Kant and Arendt’s understanding of the intellectual. Whereas Kant and Arendt see intellectual work as public, and necessarily sheared from the domestic, Livesay, in these talks, moves in fairly short order from being a housewife to being a writer with opinions on the structuring of arts funding. Doing so, she elides the distinction between the housewife, a vehicle for all that is private, and the intellectual, who is inherently public.

The relationship between private and public has been an ongoing concern in Livesay scholarship. In the 1986 conference proceedings , a number of people theorize the contradiction and, in some cases, the permeability between Livesay’s two voices. The poetry Livesay was writing in the 1950s has been mostly aligned with her private voice, in line with the belief, mentioned earlier, that the 1950s represented a time of domestic retreat in Livesay’s life. Looking at Livesay’s CBC projects from this period may serve to call into question the possibility of a truly private voice for Livesay, suggesting instead that, at least after the 1930s, historical circumstances may account for the appearance of a private voice, but deeper readings might reveal the public investments of even that voice. Jonathan C. Pierce hints at this in his suggestion that the importance of Livesay as a public poet resides in the link she makes between the private and public in her work (23).

For Pierce, however, Livesay’s public constitutes an extension of the concerns of her private work (26). If this is the case, we might be justified in aligning her not with a true public voice but with the social, to use Arendt’s terms. When we look at her speech, we see this is not entirely correct; instead, we see Livesay bridging the vast space between the domestic and the public with the language of the social. In addressing arts funding, the role of public broadcast, and the possibilities of radio for making connections between communities, Livesay appears to be interested in calling into being a public realm, in Arendt’s sense. 1950s Canada may not have had the privileged and neutral space of the polis, but the ideal of an infrastructure of funded institutions, which support cultural production by independent artists, approaches a fantasy of the polis.

In calling upon the housewife figure, Livesay appears to be drawing domestic concerns into the public realm, only to turn nearly immediately to conversations regarding programming, funding, and public policy. It seems likely that Livesay the writer held Livesay the housewife at a distance. Given Livesay’s enduring commitment to a vision of the people—an inherently public interest—it makes sense to complicate Pierce’s argument and attend to the extent to which the private as represented by Livesay appears as an extension of her public concerns.

While Livesay’s approach to the public can be said to line up with Arendt’s in that it is concerned with an institutional space of appearance for discussions that exceed personal material interest, Livesay differs from Arendt in one significant way. Unlike Arendt, for Livesay the domestic is not an abject zone in which the necessities underlying public life are sequestered. Instead, it is a politicized realm, affected by and implicated in the public realm. Succinctly, it is not outside of the polis. Put somewhat ahistorically, she demonstrates that the personal is political. This slogan distills the insights of the movements that would come to radically call into question the division between the public and the private that Kant and Arendt rely on. It is, however, important to note that this is a very different claim than that of the social, which may be condensed as the political is personal. This distinction is of increasing political significance.

In these CBC talks, when the private Livesay is extended into the public sphere it is in the form of a figure. It is through an understanding of the private Livesay as figural rather than expressive that we can most clearly see the cultural relevance of the tremendous fluidity with which the public and private circulate in Livesay’s work. When we read Livesay’s private voice, her housewife, as a self-conscious pose created in the service of public concerns, we can see that what appears to be most private in Arendt’s sense, most domestic, is in fact a guise under which Livesay may engage with the public.

One way to situate the complicated circulation of the private and the public in Livesay’s writing is as reflective of a general cultural and economic shift that would go on to shape our understandings of the political, the public, and the personal. In this framing, Livesay’s circulation of the public and the private in terms that exceed Arendt’s category of the social come to seem not only prescient but also inevitable. Arendt’s concern over the rise of the social occurs in the context of the postwar solidification of two trends in political and cultural organization: American consumer culture on the one hand, and the Soviet Union’s bureaucratization of public life on the other. The ultimate victory of the American model, which was even at the time threatening to become a global structure, may distract us from the commonality Arendt diagnosed in these trends: the creation of mass society at the expense of genuine individual engagement with democratic structures. This constituted both a political and a subjective crisis for Arendt. The rise of the social as the dominant realm in both the Soviet Union and the United States was symptomatic of the abandonment of the projects of individuality and democracy. Truly political concerns no longer appeared; in both systems, they came to be replaced by economic ones.

Livesay’s prescience in her articulation of the relationship of the personal to the political could be a coincidence. Certainly, she had no way of knowing the political insights of the second wave of feminism that were soon to emerge. But I wonder if Livesay did have an intuitive knowledge about the changing nature of the public and private. In the 1950s, even as state structures appear to be consolidating (for example, the influential role of the CBC that grounds Livesay’s interest in radio during this period) a movement away from nation toward global trade was already underway. The establishment of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, forerunner to the World Trade Organization, in 1947, might be seen as the base to the superstructure of CBC’s international New Year’s Day broadcast.

If Livesay participates in this liberal internationalism in the context of the CBC talks, her understanding of the subjectivity of the housewife as something other than a consumer identity pushes back on the kinds of subjectivity that globalization encourages. As we will see, there is a tremendous difference between the housewife as a consumer and the housewife as a situated subjective position. Livesay’s disposition to notice the effects of economic systems on people’s lives may account for what I have called her intuitive understanding of the impact of globalization on the national public sphere.

Lynette Hunter provides us with useful vocabulary for discussing the shift in the constitution of the public that globalization is still in the process of being established. In her 2006 article Hunter addresses the changes in public culture that result from the changing nature of the nation. This article offers a working definition of public culture that accounts well for the way in which Livesay appears as a public writer: If art is the culture of the empowered and relatively-empowered group with special rights which have the money both to consume and produce, to disseminate and market, and popular culture is the culture of people excluded from that empowered group, then public culture could be defined as the culture of people at last included in rights, including the right to cultural power. (145) Hunter notes that the situation of knowledge is a strategy through which these newcomers may appear in the public realm, and notes that it is the model of situated knowledge that challenges what she calls the universal/relative split of the liberal social contract (145). We might consider Livesay’s housewife as exemplifying this situatedness.

In a historical moment when the increasing exclusion of women from the public was accompanied by a retrenchment of domesticity for women, Livesay appears as a housewife to access the public. But this is not the same as being a housewife, wherein housewife is a rising consumer identity. Hunter’s article addresses the significance of this distinction quite forcefully. Hunter argues that the twentieth century has seen a shift from Althusser’s Institutional State Apparatuses, those that serve the nation, to Global State Apparatuses (GSAs), which serve the interests of global capital. Nations in general, and Canada in particular, are caught in a tension between protecting individuals against GSAs and enabling GSAs to operate within their borders (144). In this context, partiality and situatedness, which had previously been excluded from public representation and derided as interest, come to be seen as differences between subjects; these differences acquire political relevance. Hunter warns that there is a crucial distinction to be made between the situated as a politically relevant fact for previously excluded subjects and the situated as marker of consumer identity and niche marketing. Hunter asserts, partiality and the situated in themselves are no guarantee of democratic agency. They employ rhetorical techniques often similar to those used by GSAs to establish representations, which even if they are not representations for the individual in the nation state, are still representations for the consumer in global state structures (147). Hunter’s distinction is between the representations that enable new subjectivities to enter public discourse (those she calls partial), and the representations that tie difference to the individual’s role as consumer (those she calls relative) (147). To cast this in the language of Arendt, Hunter argues that there is an expanded role for a citizen who is articulated in terms that challenge those of the universal subject in the public sphere. This is seen in our increasing belief that material previously cast as private is, in fact, infused with the political. The public must come to acknowledge and include elements that had previously been relegated to the private. This is not, however, a total evacuation of the difference between public and private, or in Arendt’s language, the social. Relative identities, those that are aligned with corporate economic interests, are in Hunter’s model the location of the social, and, for Hunter as much as for Arendt, they threaten the existence of a genuine public.

Livesay’s leveraging of the housewife figure in her CBC broadcasts shows Livesay using the guise of the unthreatening relative subject (the housewife as consumer of radio in her lonely hours) to do the work of the situated subject. This is a further elaboration on my earlier claim that Livesay bridges the space between the domestic and the public with the language of the social. She stages the housewife as a private figure and then embodies that position to recuperate her access to the public sphere.

In Livesay’s poetry written in the 1950s, there is evidence that the experience of the housewife as a relative subject is in her view an unpromising basis for participation in a wider, public discussion. In the tension between two poems of this period, we can see Livesay considering, and rejecting, the notion that the private activities of the housewife connect her with anything outside of the domestic. In 1951’s Livesay traces the fantasies of a female inhabitant / Of silence; of one land; / Yet in the mind /Many times a traveler ( 93–95). The title suggests two meanings: that the subject of the poem is an intellectual, engaged, if only in fantasy, in the life of the mind, and that the subject of the poem is isolated from the stream of life and discourse, a participant only in her mind. In successive scenarios, she imagines herself travelling to various European locations, then as realmed in other consciousnesses (93) presumably a man in a community where all men think, yet think alike (94). In the final imaginary scenario of the poem, the subject revisits her own childhood, and childhood in general: Later she is thrust again / into the early area of pain. Following this we are asked if the traveler who lives with an abundant throng has lost access to her voice, before redefining the role of the voice of the poet. Instead of being part singer, dissonant, it must become the total song.

There are two ways one can read this transition from part singer, dissonant to total song. The first reading positions the subject as multiplied by her imagination, and thereby expanded to a more universal subject. In this reading, the abundant throng is the multiple interior life of the artist. In a second possible reading, the final scenario is not a purely imaginary one, but a life experience of the subject, maternity. Later she is thrust again/ Into the early area of pain,/ Her own child life; sees children grow can be read as a return to the experience of childhood, through motherhood. In this reading, the abundant throng is not an internal one, but an external one comprised of the lively distractions of family. Here it is not the imagination but rather maternal experience that allows the subject to become universal. She moves, through association with the stream of domestic life from part singer, dissonant to the total song. This calls to mind Livesay’s earlier mass chants, which are concerned with a collective poetic voice. Perhaps the total song, accessed through the labour of mothering has this in common with Livesay’s more political poetry. This second reading’s understanding of the universal is an almost exact inversion of Arendt’s claims about the role of the domestic. The false universal of a community where all men think, yet think alike is usurped by a true universal, a total song, which is only accessible through the domestic.

This vision of the mother as accessing a poetic of the universal is significantly at odds with her evocation of the housewife as a solitary figure awaiting the arrival of the outside world through radio programming. In addition, this universal, total song seems more in the realm of a mythologized and ahistorical femininity than in the realm of public discourse. Her decision not to further develop and publish this poem may suggest that she ultimately could not side with a poem that suggests that maternity is the route through which the female poet participates in a total song. (, 83), a poem of this period that did make it into print, represents a position that Livesay may have ultimately been more comfortable with. Written in tribute to Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Emily Carr, the poem insists on the impoverishment of the domestic. In this poem, family life does not bring the artist to a fusion with a larger human song but rather keeps her from an experience of the self, which is seen as necessary for the artist.

To return to Brecht’s vast network of pipes, I would like to reflect on what the fulfilment of this hope has offered, and what it has taken away. To the extent that the relative democratization of broadcast has allowed new voices to circulate, and enabled the circumvention of a tight corporate hold on the means of mass communication, it is undoubtedly a good thing. Nonetheless, at the risk of sounding nostalgic, I wonder if this unlimited circulation between private and public has produced, in Brecht’s terms, an apparatus in public life, or merely furthered the tendency Arendt saw toward the encroachment of the small concerns of the private into our understanding of the public. That the rise of the Internet parallels, in Canada, the dissolution of the structure of public funding for the arts and intellectual engagement that Livesay was interested in establishing may suggest that it is in fact part of a general diminishing of the public sphere. One doesn’t have to spend a long time reading the online comments section of a major newspaper to come to the conclusion that individual grievance rather than abstract concern for good policy forms the bulk of reader responses to major political events. Similarly, a proliferation of blogs and overtly ideological media outlets may signal that while the listener on the Internet can talk back, he talks not to peers, but in an echo chamber. It does not appear that the decentralized democratization promised by this moment does in fact constitute (to repeat Brecht’s words) the finest possible communication apparatus in public life. Perhaps we need institutions, and certain moments of listening in the absence of the possibility of broadcasting back, to allow a truly public sphere to exist.

It is through public and non-partisan institutions, like Livesay’s vision of the CBC, that the individual voice can participate in a discourse that is public in Arendt’s sense of the word. Counterintuitively, an institutional gatekeeper placing limits on access to public speech allows for individuals to appear as partial rather than simply relative. Arendt’s insistence on the neutrality of the public intellectual may strike us as naïve or conservative in the light of movements that establish the political content of the personal. However, quite relevantly for our political moment, Arendt warns that outside the neutral ideal of the public sphere lies not freedom but rather an encroaching and all-consuming economicism.