Personal Response to Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives

For many feminist academics who are aware of the continued hardships women experience in their both personal and professional lives, Ruth Lister’s Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives serves as a welcome reality check. She offers a systematic, clear, and logical study of the many functions and possible modalities of citizenship for women. Her extensive research lays out conservative definitions of citizenship, in which women were not considered, and moves on to detail radical interpretations of citizenship that challenge national borders. Lister presents a strong argument about the importance of considering citizenship for women as a concept and as a process of action, highlighting women’s agency and the long and arduous road toward successful inclusion. Also, her study does not shy away from pointing to what might seem obvious, but still needs to be stated. She underscores the intransigency of patriarchal institutions; addresses the unspoken barriers still present despite policies supposedly intended to be more inclusive of women; and, quite important, describes the very real connections between poverty and citizenship. There is no doubt that feminist students of citizenship can thank Ruth Lister for deeply thoughtful writing and engaged ongoing research.

In an era when a select number of women have clearly achieved milestones as presidential candidates and senators in the United States, it would be easy to think that the inclusion of women into the political-public sphere has been accomplished. But, as Lister’s book so eloquently details, that is an illusion. In effect, women and children are the most likely to live in poverty. Poverty, we know, can preclude citizenship, but it can also incite new models of active and insurgent citizenship from marginal spaces. In effect, what makes Lister’s book so important is her ability to show multiple versions of serious expositions of citizenship. Citizenship, as she rightly emphasizes, is a contested and extremely contextualized concept.

Aware of stereotypes and sweeping generalizations, the author presents a humanistic and hopeful narrative of citizenship in process and exposes struggles, discrepancies, and even fault lines. Tapping into her own background in campaigning politics and extensive work with the Child Poverty Action Group, she offers insights from years of experience as an activist and in policy work. What has always impressed me about Lister’s work (including her articles and her book Poverty) is her humility, despite her expertise and position of relative privilege. In the preface to the first edition, she reveals her questions, her growth, and her conviction with respect to policy:

This led me to start asking a number of questions about women’s role as citizens; about the limitations placed upon our rights as citizens and the constraints placed upon our ability to fulfill some of the obligations of citizenship. Those questions brought me eventually to this book. On the way I have developed my own understanding around these questions in three main ways. First, I have been able to pursue at a more theoretical level issues that previously I had approached primarily from the stance of an activist. From the new vantage point this gives me, I blush slightly at the theoretical naivety of some of my writing then. Nevertheless, I would argue that our theoretical understanding of citizenship needs to be grounded in an appreciation of its practical and policy implications.

(vii)

That she would “blush at her naivety” informs us that she is respectfully dedicated to her subject. She does not go in with a preconceived idea that she must confirm; instead, she is listening, learning, and growing. Ruth Lister speaks from a position of ongoing solidarity, sincerely committed to the subject in all its complexity. Her writing does not respond merely to a theoretical conundrum; it recognizes human lives with voice and agency. And she writes honestly as she discloses her own process and theoretical shifts: “My own perception of some of the practical manifestations of citizenship have shifted. In particular, I have become more conscious of the ways in which, indeed in particular, some of the most disadvantaged women act as citizens and are not simply passive in their exclusion from the full panoply of citizenship...