Citizenship by Bellamy Richard;

Author:Bellamy, Richard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, UK
Published: 2008-03-12T04:00:00+00:00

Gender and the feminist critique

Many of the traditional attributes of citizenship have been associated with male roles, such as soldiering, from which women were excluded. This fact has produced a two-pronged feminist critique of the way citizenship has come to be defined and practised. First, feminists have argued that the public practice of citizenship has often rested on the private domination of women. Second, they have argued that citizenship has been conceived in terms of masculine qualities.

The first criticism is undeniable. Both in the past and to some extent today, men have turned women into personal dependants, whom they can treat as unpaid domestic servants and direct as they will. Economic dependency resulting from the man being the main ‘bread-winner’ and, up to the 19th century, coming into possession of his wife’s assets on marriage, was often reinforced by coercion, including the legally sanctioned use of physical force – marital rape, for example, was not recognized in law or criminalized until well into the 20th century in many jurisdictions. Control of women’s domestic labour allowed ‘male’ jobs, including politics, to be so structured that the maintenance of a home and raising a family became factored out as not being a post-holder’s responsibility. Despite major legislative changes over the past 100 years – from women obtaining equal voting rights to men in almost all established democracies by the mid-20th century, to anti-discrimination and equal pay legislation passed during the second half of that century – caring roles remain largely unpaid and under-supported, and still fall mainly to women. As a result, women predominate in low-paid, part-time jobs, and are under-represented and less well rewarded in most senior management positions. A recent survey in the UK revealed that women who work part-time earn, on average, 38% less per hour than men working full-time. Even women working full-time earn 17% less per hour relative to full-time men. Politics is no exception – indeed, it performs rather worse than many professions. Fewer than 20% of British Members of Parliament are women, for example, and – at the time of writing – only 5 out of the 22 paid members of the Cabinet, the 23rd unpaid member being the female Minister for Housing. With the exception of the Scandinavian countries, where women comprise around 40% of the legislature, most democracies fare little better – indeed many, such as the United States, where only 16% of national politicians are women, do considerably worse.

How can this situation be altered, and what are its implications for how we think about politics? In particular, does de-gendering citizenship involve a distinctively feminist approach to politics? The claim that we require a new approach typically centres on the feminist slogan ‘the personal is the political’. At one level, this points to the need for a change of social attitudes that involves action outside the formal channels of politics – for example, through women challenging male assumptions that child care or cleaning are ‘women’s’ work, that is either beneath them or for which they are somehow unsuited.

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