Editors' Note: Citizenship and Nationalism

Editors' Note Citizenship and Nationalism The connection between citizenship and nationalism has not been given enough consideration by U.S. historians of women in the last thirty years,1 despite the dramatic developments in the field of women's history. Perhaps, or at least in my case, it took living outside the United States to realize this. It is readily evident today that women in the United States and most other Western democracies remain second-class citizens even after being granted the right to vote and accorded varying degrees of equality of opportunity in the work force and educational institutions. This is because they continue to lack three basic freedoms enjoyed by men under most constitutional or other democratic forms of government: freedom from inferior legislative, constitutional or juridical status (usually meaning fewer individual economic, educational, and legal opportunities and choices enjoyed by mainstream men); freedom from fertility and family discrimination (fewer reproductive rights, including access to abortion and inferior position within traditional family hierarchies); and 3) freedom from fear (fewer protections from the uncontrolled and often ignored violence against women throughout the world). In other words, a common inferior or second-class citizenship has been imposed on women throughout the world. Why is this the case? The major reason stems from traditional male origins of definitions of democratic citizenship—definitions now employed in the new emerging democracies of Eastern Europe and Russia and most of the Third World. However, another reason lies in the fact that feminists and historians of women have not usually focused on the general meaning of citizenship for women in their respective countries until recently. Instead, they have championed certain aspects of male citizenship , such as equal political and legal treatment under the law, rather than trying to transform male definitions of citizenship to meet the societal requirements of women. This is why we need a feminist approach to international law—to make sure that human rights include women's rights. We must rethink the definition of national and global citizenship based on equality of rights so that they include those rights which correspond to women's experiences and needs, as they are reflected in different countries all over the world. 1996 Editors' Note 7 The history of citizenship for women in the United States and under United Nations' covenants demonstrates that equal rights in the areas of work and education, while a necessary starting point for obtaining firstclass citizenship for women, has not been enough because such equality is typically based on male standards. Yet women do not exist on an equal footing with men in either postindustrial or less developed nations. In labor forces all over the world, for example, equal treatment (and its opposite, special or protective treatment) are still defined by men and do not offer women true equality. Equal treatment invites women to perform as "ideal [male] workers" without the flow of domestic services historically provided male workers by women.2 This inequality was quickly recognized by overworked feminists in the 1970s when they said: "I need a wife." Special treatment of women workers in the past has resulted in protective legislation discriminating against average working women and in the present to creating special, usually inferior, "mommy tracks" for professional women. Neither legal /cultural approach results in equality or full citizenship for women. Unless women simply want to aspire to act as, and be treated like men—despite the odds against achieving this status—equitable, not simply equal, treatment of women must be included in any definition of national or global citizenship in the future. As feminists attorneys have said: "the rhetoric of human rights, on both the national and international levels, regards women as equal citizens [when they are not], as 'individuals' subject to the same level of treatment and the same protection as men. But the discourse of 'traditional values' may prevent women from enjoying any human rights, however, they may be described [because male standards are still the norm]."3 Likewise, nationalism, be it after the American Revolution or the Irish Rising—or in the former Yugoslavia and other recently liberated communist nations—was usually not favorably disposed toward the needs or rights of women. Throughout the...