Women's Suffrage in Asia by Louise Edwards Mina Roces

Author:Louise Edwards, Mina Roces [Louise Edwards, Mina Roces]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134320356
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2006-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

Theorizing citizenship

In a legal sense, citizenship refers to nationality; that is, a citizen holds documentation indicating he or she is, to a greater or lesser extent, under the protection of the consular offices of the home country when outside that country. Nationality does not necessarily guarantee the rights that are embodied in the other common discourse on citizenship, that is, agency and empowerment in decision-making. Before the granting of suffrage rights, a woman could be a national without having the full rights of citizenship. Both citizenship and nationality have long been profoundly gendered categories. In the United States between 1907 and 1922, for instance, a female native-born American citizen/national was required to assume her husband's nationality if he was not an American. In Japan before 1983 a child could inherit only his or her father's nationality; mothers could not pass their nationality on to their children if their father was not Japanese.3 Citizenship, in the sense of participation in articulation of policy, has historically been gendered to an even greater degree than has nationality. While such participation is not limited to political rights, its highest form, in a liberal democratic state, is membership in the polity. Membership often includes a productive and paid role in the economy, but its definitive expression is the right to vote. Despite the common notion that citizenship defined as the right to vote principally implies agency and empowerment, citizenship has additional meanings. Suffrage is also a marker of social standing, particularly in a polity in which the state withholds suffrage rights from some classes of people. The right to vote is ‘a certificate of full membership in society.’4

The right to vote is the end of a long line of demands for political and social membership, and does not stand, sui generis, as an isolated demand. Moreover, while feminists, including those in Japan in the 1920s, have asserted that the vote is the key that permits women to be involved in civic participation,5 the relationship of suffrage to civic participation is more complicated than that. Women's civic participation, before women gained the vote, in Japan and elsewhere, was used to justify the demand for political rights. Civic participation and suffrage are, in this sense, mutually imbricated. Interestingly, while civic participation was cited, before men or women were enfranchised, as the reason why they deserved the vote, once they received the vote, they did not have to continue civic participation or any other deeds of ‘good citizenship’ to retain that right. In this sense, citizens with suffrage resembled subjects who also retained their status — that of subjecthood — regardless of their activities. To be sure, in Japan, subjects were constantly exhorted to shoulder responsibility to serve their monarch and state as good soldiers, good wives and mothers, or other good Japanese, but they did not need to carry out any particular activities to be considered subjects.

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