ABSTRACT
In recent years, an impressive body of literature revising the concept of citizenship from a feminist perspective has emerged. It has been argued, for example, that citizenship is not simply a ‘status bestowed on those who are full members of a community’ as T.H.Marshall (1950:28) claimed, but that it is constructed both as a status and as a social practice (Lister, 1997a). Lister emphasizes the need for a framework in which citizenship recognizes ongoing structural constraints and their effects on women while at the same time, not reducing women to passive victims but, rather, also recognizing their active potential, their agency. While she rejects the concept of a unitary, universal woman, she suggests maintaining a ‘differentiated universalism’, ‘which, rather than denying diversity and difference, acknowledges them’ (Lister, 1997b).
