The article discusses some of the major issues which need to be examined in a gendered reading of citizenship. However, its basic claim is that a comparative study of citizenship should consider the issue of women's citizenship not only by contrast to that of men, but also in relation to women's affiliation to dominant or subordinate groups, their ethnicity, origin and urban or rural residence. It should also take into consideration global and transnational positionings of these citizenships. The article challenges (...) the gender-blind and Westocentric character of many of the most hegemonic theorizations of citizenship, focusing in particular on the questions of membership in ‘the community’, group rights and social difference and the ways binaries of public/private and active/passive have been constructed to differentiate between different kinds of citizenships. The article argues that in order to be able to analyse adequately people's citizenship, especially in this era of ethnicization on the one hand and globalization on the other hand, and with the rapid pace at which relationships between states and their civil societies are changing, citizenship should best be analysed as a multi-tiered construct which applies, at the same time to people's membership in sub-, cross- and supra-national collectivities as well as in states. (shrink)

Democracy is the central political issue of our age, yet debates over its nature and goals rarely engage with feminist concerns. Now that women have the right to vote, they are thought to present no special problems of their own. But despite the seemingly gender-neutral categories of individual or citizen, democratic theory and practice continues to privilege the male. This book reconsiders dominant strands in democratic thinking - focusing on liberal democracy, participatory democracy, and twentieth century versions of civic republicanism (...) - and approaches these from a feminist perspective. Anne Phillips explores the under-representation of women in politics, the crucial relationship between public and private spheres, and the lessons of the contemporary women's movement as an experience in participatory democracy. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

One of the most perceptive and ambidextrous social commentators of our day, Augustinian scholar Jean Bethke Elshtain furnishes in ever fresh ways through her writings a bridge between the ancient and the modern, between politics and ethics, between timeless moral wisdom and cultural sensitivity. To read Elshtain seriously is to take the study of culture as well as the "permanent things" seriously. But Elshtain is no mere moralist. Neither is she content solely to dwell in the domain of the theoretical. (...) For it is Elshtain the citizen - the creatively engaged and contributing citizen - whom the reader encounters on virtually every page of her writings. But reader beware: Elshtain does not shy away from controversy. At the same time, she is anything but a controversialist. In the essay that follows, several prominent themes that emerge from Elstain's writings - civic responsibility, justice, gender, and war - are considered afresh. Whether one agrees with her positions or not, one is forced to confess in the end that she cares deeply about the common good. And this alone makes her required reading for any engaged citizen of the republic. (shrink)

"Eisenstein argues clearly and forcefully for the importance of reinventing a comprehensive rights discourse through the recognition of individual specified needs."—Donna J. Haraway, University of California, Santa Cruz "Inspired by events in Eastern Europe and building on her earlier, pathbreaking critiques of patriarchy, neoconservatism, and neoliberalism, Eisenstein asks: how shall a white feminist living in the U.S. in the 1990s position herself in a world where so much has changed yet so much remains the same? Her answer, daring and persuasive, (...) steers through the post-1989 debates in Eastern Europe over the meaning of democracy; the searing race-gender controversies of recent U.S. politics—the Gulf War, AIDS, abortion, affirmative action, the Hill-Thomas hearings; and finally to the conclusion that we must radically redefine, not reject, liberal concepts like "rights," "equality," and "privacy."—Rosalind P. Petchesky, Hunter College, author of Abortion and Woman's Choice. (shrink)