Gender, Citizenships and Subjectivities

This volume explores the relationship of citizenship and gender across a range of regions, nations and historical time periods. This collection of essays acknowledges the accomplishments of feminist scholarship in explicating the gendered exclusions that were inherent in notions of citizenship and civil society at their inception. In eight case studies the authors seek to render citizenship a useful category of feminist analysis by embracing the dualities, contingencies and contradictions contained in the concept of citizenship. The notion of citizenship as subjectivity acknowledges the importance of the legal prescriptions of citizenship rights and duties, but probes more centrally how those historical actors who lacked formal citizenship rights (women, minorities) assigned meanings to the prescriptions and delineations of citizenship laws, rhetorics, and practices. At the heart of each case study is an exploration of how gender shaped claims–making activity in the name of citizenship and how women, often aligned with immigrants and minorities, took a leading role in articulating these claims.

1. Introduction: Gender, Citizenship and Subjectivity: Some Historical and Theoretical Considerations: Kathleen Canning and Sonya O. Rose. 2. Citizens and Scientists: Toward a Gendered History of Scientific Practice in Post–revolutionary France: Carol E. Harrison. 3. The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canoncial Texts in Britain, 1880–1914: Laura E. Nym Mayhall. 4. Imagining Female Citizenship in the ′New Spain′: Gendering the Deomcratic Transition, 1975–1978: Pamela Beth Radcliff. . 5. The Trial of the New Woman: Citizens–in–Training in the New Soviet Republic: Elizabeth A. Wood. . 6. Enfranchised Selves: Women, Culture and Rights in Nineteenth–Century Bengal: Tanika Sarkar. . 7. Citizenship as Non–Discrimination: Acceptance or Assimilationism? Political Logic and Emotional Investment in Campaigns for Aboriginal Rights in Australia, 1940–1970: Marilyn Lake. . 8. Producing Citizens, Reproducing the ′French Race′: Imimigration, Demography, and Pronatalism in Early Twentieth–Century France: Elisa A. Camiscioli. 9. Citizenship as Contingent National Belonging: Married Women and Foreigners in Twentieth–Century Switzerland: Brigitte Studer, translated by Kate Sturge. Notes on Contributors. Index.

Kathleen Canning is associate professor of History and Women′s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Languages of Labor and Gender: Female Factory Work in Germany 1850–1914 (Cornell University Press, 1996) and is currently working on a new book, Embodied Citizenships: Gender and the Crisis of Nation in Weimar Germany . Sonya O. Rose is Professor of History, Sociology and Women′s Studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (University of California Press, 1992) and co–editor with Laura L. Frader, of Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 1996). She has recently completed work on a new book, Which People′s War? National Identity and Citizenship in World War II Britain (forthcoming).