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Citizenship: Citizenship is the legal status of an individual as a recognized member of a particular nation or country. It confers certain rights and obligations, such as the right to vote, hold public office, and access public services, while also imposing responsibilities such as paying taxes and obeying the law. See also State (Polity), Citizens, Bourgois/Citoyen, Law, Rights, Political elections, Electoral systems, Taxation.
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Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Sylvia Walby on Citizenship - Dictionary of Arguments

Gaus I 281
Citizenship/Walby/Mottier: Tradition: Mainstream political theory (...) considers citizenship as a universal concept. Democratic rights of social and political participation apply to each citizen without regard for his or her race, religion or gender.
FeminismVsTradition: Feminist authors have shown the central premises of universalistic conceptions of citizenship to be flawed due to gender bias. As the work of Vicky Randall (1998)(1), Ruth Lister (1997)(2) and Sylvia Walby (1994)(3) illustrates, women have been either excluded, or differentially included, in citizenship.
WalbyVsTradition: Walby's historical analysis, for example, demonstrates the gendered nature of citizenship through a critical assessment of the work of T. H. Marshall (1950)(4), which is often taken to be the starting point for modern debates on the question (...).
>Citizenship(Marshall.
Citizenship/Marshall: According to Marshall, different types of citizenship developed successively, with civic rights in the eighteenth century, political rights in the nineteenth and social rights in the twentieth.
WalbyVsMarshall: Analysing the history of citizenship in the United Kingdom and the US, Walby questions Marshall's thesis. For example, up to the 1920s, in contrast to men, British and American women had not yet acquired the majority of civic and political rights. In addition, the political rights were acquired by women before the civic rights, contradicting Marhall's sequential model. In other words, as Walby demonstrates, the three types of citizenship rights described by Marshall have followed different historical trajectories for different social groups.
The conception of a unique model of citizenship therefore reveals a gender bias which is also present in the work of later authors who built on Marshall's work, such as Turner and Mann. As Walby points out, these authors similarly put the emphasis on the importance of social class in the history of citizenship and the formation of the nation-state, but neglect other factors such as gender or race. In this respect Walby joins other feminist critics of the concept of citizenship, such as Lister (1990)(5) and Pateman (1989)(6), for whom the fact that women
have not been treated in any democracy as full and equal citizens means that 'democracy has never existed' (1989(6): 372).
Gender roles/WalbyVsPateman/WalbyVsLister: However, Walby also points out an important contradiction in their work: on the one hand, authors such as Lister and Pateman question the gendered nature of the frontiers between the public and the private while insisting on the importance of female values and roles (Pateman, 1991)(7) and on the recognition by the public sphere of the work done by women in the private sphere (Lister, 1990)(5).

1. Randall, Vicky (1998) 'Gender and power: women engage the state'. In Vicky Randall and Georgina
Waylen, eds, Gende'; Politics and the State. London: Routledge, 185-205.
2. Lister, Ruth (1997) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
3. Walby, Sylvia (1994) 'Is citizenship gendered?' Sociology, 28 (2): 379-95.
4. Marshall, T. H. (1950) Class, Citizenship and Social Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
5. Lister, Ruth (1990) 'VVomen, economic dependency and citizenship'. Journal of Social Policy, 19 (4): 445-67.
6. Pateman, Carole (1989) The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory.
Cambridge: Polity.
7. Pateman, Carole (1991) The Disorder of Women. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Véronique Mottier 2004. „Feminism and Gender Theory: The Return of the State“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications


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Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.
Walby, Sylvia
Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004


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