# Transcript

Ruth

Another dilemma that citizenship theorists face is, citizenship is, in a sense, quintessentially a universalist concept, that it is about equal status or at least universalistic within the bounds of a nation state, and that we have equal status against this kind of yard stick for us all. And therefore some people argue that it is not a concept we should be using these days because…not because we shouldn’t all have equal status, but because it promotes what has been called a false universalism that ignores that there are differences between us. Differences that we, not the differences of poverty and so forth that we want to erase, but differences that are important to people, differences between women and men, differences between ethnic groups, differences between disabled people and non disabled people, differences of age and sexuality, and I think part of the what we might call the project of a radical approach to citizenship is to try and build into this universalist concept, a notion of difference.

Now it is difficult to do and a number of us are struggling with it at present, so I haven’t got an easy answer for you, but I think it is partly about trying to break down the kind of way we think in dichotomies that either it has to be universalist or it has to be about particularists and each group being different. We have to find ways that we can transcend these dichotomies and bring the two together.

Mary

I asked Ruth Lister what she felt were the differences between men and women in relation to citizenship.

Ruth

One of the dilemmas in thinking about citizenship for women is do women want to claim their rights as citizens as ‘equals’ with men or as ‘different’ from men. Now I am not using the sense ‘different’ in some essentialist sense that biological differences make all sorts of other differences, but that because of the sexual division of labour women still have a domestic role that men by and large don’t have which constructs the contours of their citizenship and it’s a role that many feminists would argue we should not devalue.

We shouldn’t say that the answer is simply to get women into the labour market to be like men, you know and not worry about the issue of care because care in itself is important. I mean care takes place in the public and the private sphere, paid in the public sphere, unpaid in the private by and large. So there are some that would argue that we have got citizen the carer and citizen the worker. Citizen the worker is privileged when it comes to social security rights and so forth, citizen the carer does very badly. So what do we do about that? There are some people who would argue the answer is to pay citizen the carer as if it were paid work and that is the only way of valuing it, but the problem is if you do that the danger is that you then cement the sexual division of labour because being realistic you are never going to pay citizen the carer the same sort of wage rates that citizen the worker is getting, even probably citizen the low paid worker. So it will continue to be women who are citizens the carers, perhaps even more locked into the private sphere than they have been in the past, or they are at present.

But I think part of the answer does go back to this question of trying to shift the sexual division of labour itself so that everyone has a citizen the carer and everyone has a citizen the worker and you have the opportunity to combine the two and that goes again back to social policy issues about ‘what are now called family friendly employment policies’ that make it easier for both women and men to combine paid work. Family responsibilities not just the care of children, but also increasingly important the care of older people.

Mary

As you have seen while you have been studying D218, Marshall has identified social policy as the critical mechanism for promoting equal rights; he calls it the social rights of citizenship.

As Ruth Lister shows it’s often women whose rights are compromised as citizens.

Ruth

I think social policy plays a crucial role in thinking about citizenship and it’s very important that political theorists ground their theories in social policy and examples range right across the social policy field. I mean a very simple one, which I found my students were quite surprised by, but very interested by, was the question of public transport, they hadn’t thought of that as a woman’s issue. But when I gave them some reading around the, you know, A) that women have less access to private transport, when they thought about their own lives, about sometimes being afraid to go out at night on your own, waiting at dark bus stops and so forth. So if you don’t have access like that it is actually making it harder for women to be fully participating in the public sphere, which is where citizenship is traditionally seen to lie in its active sense. Also women’s access, say women with children, their access to public transport, which is again a parallel issue for disabled people. So questions of access in that way, social policy is crucial.

The women’s position in the labour market, in modern days it has been said that whereas in the past military service was the key to citizenship, today its paid employment and it is a key to citizenship in the sense that in most countries many social rights through the benefits system are tied to employment status. So if you don’t have full employment status in terms of a wage earning record that has bought you contributions for the social security system, then you are outside that core contributory benefit system, and either have to end up relying on means tested benefits or relying on a working partner, and that in my view is incompatible with full citizenship, that you are not able to earn your own rights to social security benefits.

If you look at Scandinavia it is an explicit goal of public policy to try and shift the sexual division of labour within the family. So for instance parental leave in one or two Scandinavian countries there is now a month of that that is reserved for fathers. If the father doesn’t take it, you lose it altogether, and that has been a deliberate attempt to get men more engaged in the business of child-rearing in the hope that they will then do more later on as well.

There are a whole range of ways that social policy underpins women’s citizenship and it goes back to T. H. Marshall’s notion of the Political, Civil and Social Rights and of course social policy is quintessential about the social rights, but those three sets of rights aren’t separate they all interlink, and in some ways it is the social rights that have to underpin the others.

Mary

Ruth Lister. Another important area of social policy in relation to people’s rights as citizens is education as you have seen in Book two. I talked to Professor Madeleine Arnot about education and citizenship.

Prof Madeleine Arnot

They say that the education system, the educational institutions are the modernist project par excellence, they actually capture the nature of the modern society by saying that they are training the modern citizen, the modern worker and it is this notion of training the citizen is precisely what the state education system was all about. You set minimum standards, as somebody was saying minimum competencies and what you want the citizen to have. You also have notions of ethical virtues of values of rules of conduct that you already have built into the education system. So the whole project is about education of the citizen. That then leads into the choice of curriculum, the approach that you take in history, in English literature. You are teaching all sorts of principles and rules about the citizen through the content of the curriculum.

So we are already learning what it is like to grow up in Britain, be part of British society at every point in the school system. It is not something that is outside of it, it is what it was there for, its one of its tasks is to create social order. What we haven’t done very often is make that explicit, it has now become much more implicit in our culture and in the forms of knowledge that we teach, but that is why we have had so much contestation about how do you teach British history, how to…whether you should teach Shakespeare, whether you should teach Englishness, or whether you should teach something that’s more international.

Mary

So education has a role in creating the modern citizen, but what does this mean for women, does education have a role in addressing their different life opportunities? Madeleine Arnot again.

Madeleine

You have to be conscious that you have to be aware of differences between women, that women experience citizenship rights differently, they experience participation differently, and therefore you can use it as a concept, as a vehicle to explore difference. You can also analyse classrooms in terms of the construction of difference between different sets of pupils by ethnicity, by age, by social class.

So you could either do it through the analysis of the processes of construction of difference, and how those differences emerge, or you could do it through a political education that actually makes those differences explicit and then you start working with it and for example if you take the slogan that they use in Denmark about equal valuing of difference, if there is an argument that if you make the differences explicit rather than hide them, you can actually then start to learn how to value them equally, but that means really finding strategies for teaching that articulate difference rather than pretending they don’t exist.

Mary

Madeleine Arnot. Citizenship as a notion has produced a rallying cry for different pressure groups to focus on and has led policy makers to begin to acknowledge and take account of equal rights for all citizens. Helen Meekosha.

Helen

One of the most exciting things for disabled people has been the growing rise of the disability movement both in the UK, the US, Australia and indeed across the world. And many of the new – not new rights, but many of the breaking down the barriers, have been occasioned by people taking to the streets, by lobbying, by organising themselves. In Britain I think one of the most powerful and impressive social movements is the disability movement.

There are issues of course for women in any social movement, issues about women not necessarily being at the forefront, issues about women doing the background organising work and not taking the power and learning to negotiate and lobby at the head of the movement if you like. Nevertheless women have been extraordinarily successful in the UK. As an Australian I watch with wonder as the disability action network organised around the country chaining themselves to buses and trains, and doing terribly brave things. Blind women, women with hearing impairments, women using wheelchairs, have taken on the forces of the law in order to get their rights.

Mary

Professor Ruth Lister is also excited by the growing pressure from women in Europe.

Ruth

We are seeing on the one hand women tending to be more active citizens at the very local level, but also now being citizens at the global level through networking around United Nations conferences and so forth and international alliances around home working and things like that, but still somehow we get lost in many countries at the national level in between.

Similarly at European Union level, I think women have made quite an impact and gender issues are very much on the agenda of the European Union. I think too much of sort of still constructing women as a homogenous group and not taking adequate account of the needs of minority group women, migrant women and so forth, but at least because equal opportunities between women and men is part and parcel of the remit of the European Commission, it has I think given – well it certainly in the UK and many other member states, it has enhanced women’s rights as citizens.