The Inviolable Woman: Feminist Conceptions of Citizenship in Australia, 1900-1945

Abstract

Abstract The meaning of citizenship is currently attracting renewed attention around the world. At the same time that people are identifying new democratic possibilities in a revitalized citizenship, however, feminists have been pointing both to the masculinist terms in which citizenship has been conceptualized and to women’s effective exclusion, in practice, from the basic citizen’s right of self government in Western democracies. These theoretical and practical issues are, of course, related. The assumed autonomy of the citizen, for example, rested on the understanding that someone else was responsible for domestic work and the maintenance of every day life. To participate fully as active citizens in public life, women have had to emulate men’s condition of freedom from private constraints and domestic responsibilities. Comparatively few have been willing and able to do so, and one result is that women every where are dramatically under-represented in political institutions. Both the discourse and practice of citizenship, feminist scholars have concluded, are profoundly gendered activities.