ABSTRACT
Urban citizenship has been studied more extensively in German scholarship than in that focusing on Western Europe, where cities lost their independence to centralizing states earlier. Existing studies of urban citizenship have concentrated on changes in bases, tracing the substitution of pecuniary military obligations for personal ones, increases in the levels of wealth required for citizenship, and the exclusion of certain people on the grounds that their occupation was dishonourable. German Neo-Aristotelians in the seventeenth century added women's inability to bear arms and their economic dependence on their husbands to their mental and moral weakness as reasons for excluding them from all aspects of public life. Thus by the time state citizenship became an issue in Germany, war, work, and wealth appeared to be natural and long-standing reasons for excluding women, as the writings of the nineteenth-century jurist Carl Welcker make clear.
