Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law

Breaking the Mold of Citizenship: The “Natural” Person as Citizen in Nineteenth-Century America (A Fragment)

Breaking the Mold of Citizenship: The "Natural" Person as Citizen in Nineteenth-Century America (A Fragment) Elizabeth B. Clark Mary Wollstonecraft once said, probably with a sigh, "I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behavior." Two centuries later, many groups in American political life are still caught in the same dilemma: hoping that a just society will take account of an essential characteristic-race and sex spring to mind-in ways that will benefit the group, while eschewing the potentially harmful characterizations that lie just on the flip side of the coin. Group identities were already an important part of the political structure well before nineteenth-century reform movements brought into play the interests of people who were not traditional political Elizabeth Battelle Clark, 1952-97, delivered an early version of this paper as a Mellon Lecture at Amherst College. She was already ill at the time that she drafted the speaking version , and she was and remained unsatisfied with what she had written. After finding that she did not have the strength to complete a revision, she turned the work over to her friends Katherine Stone and Dirk Hartog, with the request that we try to do something with it. With the help of Sarah Gordon, we have tried to produce an essay that reflects Betsy Clark's hopes. We have only lightly edited the work, drawing on paragraphs from two drafts. We have decided not to annotate the piece. No conclusion and only a sketch of an introduction exist, and we are unwilling to impose an interpretive frame on her words. But we have included a bibliography of Betsy Clark's writings, to guide the interested reader to the sources on which she drew and to the larger themes that she was working on in this piece and in all of her writings. 28 CULTURAL PLURALISM, IDENTITY POLITICS, AND THE LAW actors; their entrance into the formal political arena only brought the question of groups to public notice. The introduction of new groups to political power fragmented the structure of representative citizenship on which the American system, like other Western systems, was based. This essay looks broadly at the destruction and reconstruction of group identities in the period from abolitionism to the Nineteenth Amendment , with an eye to implications for our own time. I would like to focus here on three ways in which nineteenth-century liberal reform movements worked to challenge the legal order and to fragment older, monolithic models of citizenship in order to provide a more inclusive model, and on some of the consequences of those campaigns . First, reformers challenged the legitimacy of the uniformity of law, not on the basis of the fact that it discriminated against groups (although that was one outcome), but because they argued that no uniform structure could take account of individual difference. This argument was influenced both by romantic notions of the depth and diversity of individual experience and by strongly Protestant notions of the supremacy of individual conscience over traditional authorities. Second, I will talk about the new characteristics that qualified the person as a rights-bearing individual, qualities rooted in a natural view of personhood that brought to the fore "private" experiences like bodily pain and family and sexual relationships that had formerly been completely excluded from the persona of the citizen. Third, I will talk about ways in which the women's movement in particular sought to destabilize ingrained oppressive patterns of law and custom by bringing the private world of family and domestic relations into the public sphere, for purposes of creating a rights regime that would reflect women's experiences. Finally, I will address the ways in which this reform rhetoric paved the way for multiple claims and challenges to the neutrality and uniformity of law and rights regimes today, and some of the strengths and weaknesses of the antecedents on which we rely. In the nineteenth century , the highly politicized and fluid arena of rights consciousness offered an open forum for the struggle over importing an individual's subjective claims into law. The forms of claims for rights of the person developed in that arena have shaped our history ever since. How did law accommodate the conflicting claims of disparately situated persons or groups in the period before the political upheavals of BREAKING THE MOLD OF CITIZENSHIP the mid-nineteenth...