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.

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).