What Welfare Provisions do Women Need to Become Full Citizens?

Abstract

‘Citizen-the-carer’ or ‘citizen-the-wage-earner’? — this is the choice that all too often faces us when pressing the case for women’s full citizenship in the social sphere. In other words, does the route to women’s social citizenship rights lie through recognition of the care work still undertaken largely by women or through equality in the labour market? This question expresses at the policy level two competing theoretical and political strands that have for many years run through feminism — commonly described as difference vs. equality.² They represent a contemporary variant of what Carol Pateman has summed up as Wollstonecraft’s dilemma, after the tensions that ran through Mary Wollstonecraft’s work. On the one hand she writes, women

have demanded that the ideal of citizenship be extended to them, and the liberal-feminist agenda for a ‘gender-neutral’ social world is the logical conclusion of one form of this demand. On the other hand, women have also insisted, often simultaneously, as did Mary Wollstonecraft, that as women, they have specific capacities, talents, needs and concerns, so that the expression of their citizenship will be differentiated from that of men. Their unpaid work providing welfare could be seen, as Wollstonecraft saw women’s tasks as mothers, as women’s work as citizens, just as their husbands’ paid work is central to men’s citizenship.

This chapter draws on chapters 4 and 7 of Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Lister, 1997a).