A Magnified Image of Female Citizenship in Education: Illusions of Democracy or Liberal Challenges to Symbolic Domination?

Abstract

Liberal democracies, in contrast to autocratic and authoritarian regimes, underscore, at the level of abstract theory, the importance of female autonomy and a notion of full political suffrage. Yet, at the same time, any notion of rational citizenship within liberal democracies has often served — symbolically and practically — to restrict women’s sense of their own political agency, providing ‘freedoms’ to some whilst undermining the political rights of women who have never been properly enfranchised (Alexander, 1997). This fundamental paradox raises a number of pressing questions, practical as well as theoretical, to which urgent attention needs to be directed.

The liberal definition of citizenship constructs all citizens as basically the same and considers the differences of class, ethnicity and gender and so on as irrelevant to their status as citizens. (Nira Yuval-Davis, 1997)

For whom does freedom exist? (Hannah Arendt, 1971)

This part of the title was borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu’s (1999) book entitled Masculine Domination (chapter 1).

This chapter is based in part upon an article by Dillabough and Arnot (2003) which has been published in The School Field Journal as ‘Recasting Educational Debates about Female Citizenship, Agency and Identity’. It is also based upon work we collated for an edited collection published under the title of Challenging Democracy (2000).