ABSTRACT
Education systems, as we know, play a crucial role in the formation of citizens in a national context and are increasingly being called upon to address global citizenship agendas. As international agencies and world funding agencies are now aware, female access to education is central to the project of social progress. However, the ‘rights of access to education’ are not suffi cient to meet feminist egalitarian goals. Even though gender equality is one of the great democratic principles, we shall argue that the models of democratic citizenship on which educational systems are built often exclude gender concerns. All too often, representations of citizenship are abstracted from real social (gender) relations and little attention is paid to the gendered nature of citizenship ideals. Feminist educationalists, therefore, have sought in many different ways to redefi ne what is meant by ‘democratic’, exploring and exposing, in particular, the limitations of liberal democratic educational traditions and its sometimes negative consequences for women. Democratic education from a feminist perspective involves, at a far deeper level, a challenge to the social conditions that have sustained women’s second-class citizenship and their experiences of poverty, violence, harassment and economic exploitation.
