Citizen and citizenship ate powerful words. They speak of respect, of rights, Consider the meaning and emotion packed into the French citoyen Word that condemned tyranay and social hierarchy while affirming us equality: that was 2 moment when even women. « ‘ommistee, We Find no pejorative uses. It's rental, humanist word, na.+y FRASER ANI nce, public heal expression “private wealt dangerous to enter. In general enship: for example, public schools, public parks, services. T “social 16s a richly elaborated discourse il citizenship.” ‘vision las been shaped largely -versus-charity opposition. Invi tions are drawn, for example, between ‘would not erase the needs of or the infirm. No decent ‘rable entitlemer cceptual resource ” programs andNave tizenship, was to be constructed in the twentieth century; for Marshall, the guarantee of economic security, but also the dissolve divergent class cultures imto a a progressive decoupling of money income fro ‘which would include many tax-funded services provided pal ja established by public provision, be hoped, gh as to approach thee ld buy would be mere fells. The the purchased ser- the norm. ity of market mechanisms and iced that the further development ig the izenship co te social rel oward greater equality ‘TH. Marshall is tonic reading in this period of widespread pessimism about pul be appropriate When questions about gender and race are put at the center of the inquiry 's analysis become periodization ket forces arenas of dou tween work and welfare, and continger need not be Reimagining who cannot obiai who are disabled or whoLIS Nancy PRasen AND LINDA Gonos ndered, ideological opposition between contract an tures state provision of welfare today. (In this essay we use ips were cast as vol iments, entered into out of individu: actual agreement, defined as anc» posed the enforce be they comm orable phrase, c coaly of the tangi es of ci the ability t0| n arbitrary imprisonment iberty of movement and bo Teeclom of speech, thought, sue in a court of Iaw in order to enforce al one’s other rights Certain! way of eoneei this property-centered contract model is not the civil society. In the eighteenth and nineteen cont izenship. hhas since become, the contra I society represented a revolutio recognize “individu pendent of their place in a statu as freely chosen, citizenship was not {or the most radical early proponents Women, of course, tizenship for cen: citizenship should be different. Consequently, civil so- “civil society.” not were excluded fron turies, and there was no. acconded the poor, servi slavery. In the leg the raditional subject-United States, for examp! and civil citizenship guaranteed the property rights of one to possess the other. In one of the great ironies history of civi U.S. Married Women’s Property Act, passed in Mississippi in 1839, was aimed at securing slaveholders’ wives tights over slaves.’ Meanwhile, the citizenship claims of white male wage earn! Aga helped construct core Since hardly surprising that those excluded from civil citi- ose who did not own property, either because they c ‘were unable to get their resources defined as proper tenants, workers) or because they Jed to heads of households against intrud often deprived slaves, workers, women, and to stop abuse by their mast theory, then, civil duals.” They belonged instead to male in coverture, and the legal classi ple matters of exclusion. They actual ip, for it was by protecting, subsuming, and even ow ‘white male property owners and family heads became citizens,y- and kin-based relationships. Instead of depend- ishands, wives usually had a variety of bases from which (o claim needed resources, . from the moral-economic consequently, the property geoisie juncture between two different “spheres” of society y fe: resources were exchanged for ex- cuit of exchange, This several respects, The norm: ice, and different social g teal agendas. For exat between two “spheres” was ideological in propounded were constantly violated in prac- working-class men and women used ideas ruggles for ving and working ‘conditions and in the dev and respectability. Likewise, to argue for influence as mothers, ‘contractual exchange, ws he presupposi advantage. It was applied even to nonmarket spheres, such a pk as to commere! luence representations lations appear to be theory. dance over a progressively larger share of ‘complementary other. C! the recipient had no ct ‘The binary ther ideologi the giver s, such doubts fueled repeated waves ot sought to counter the “degenerative” indisc ‘on recipients and on society as a whole. Thus the co sition repeatedly menaced the charity side; what had appeared to be a sta le dichotomy was always in danger of dissolving. Second, the contract-versus-charity dichotomy shrouded the very ‘of noncontractual reciprocity, rendering invisible a whole range‘of popular practices that defied the official binary categorization. neighborly, and community obligations in a variety of guises and forms. Yet these practices ‘and official politcal legitimacy, In time, their existence contributed to teenth century, moreover, whi States, ig the experience of interpersonal help that was nei. ther contractual nor charitable, CONTRACT, CHARITY, AND WELEARE The contract-versus-charity dichotomy thus to some extent remade reality its image, crowding out other types of relations, It impressed its stamp rongly on state provision of welfare, which developed along dic In the United States, government programs from ear ‘on some of the trappings of civil exchange, gua to some citizens by mimicking private contract trast, were cast as proffering unreciprocated ty stream was exemplified by mothers’ pensions.® coded ichotomy persists today in »position between social insurance and public assis- ‘ance programs, The first were designed by reformers to appear “contribu .” seemingly embodying the principle of exchange; recipients, originally ended to be exclusively white, male, and relatively privileged members of the working class, are defined as “entitle 8 recipi- insurance advocates of the early twen {erm contributory as a thetorical ss aware that all welfare programs are financed through fering only as to where and how curtailed. For example, AFDC the United States have been denied the {abridged by state residency requirements); the right to due process (abridged inistrative procedures for determining eligibility and terminating ben- right (0 protection from unreasonable search and seizure (abridged by unannounced home visits); the right to privacy (abridged by “morals test ng”) and the right to equal protection under the law (abridged by a above). In the 1960s and 1970s U.S courts overtumed many of these tices, bat 70s and 1980s brought a rash of new restrict receipt of ym continues to hamper Cial provision today. Since the wage appears as an exchange labor, it is argued that all resources should be apportioned change. The widespread fear that “welfare” recipients are “gett thing for nothin impact of economie recession, the claims States today are being weakened by a resurgence logy of ei ip stands in a tense, tionship to soci ip. This is nowhere more ted States, where the dominant understanding of civil Citizenship remains strongly inflected by notions of “i “inde- 7 been constructed fo connote “char-120 Nancy Feaasert Np Lina Goroon and “dependence.” What is missing is pressing ideas 's conception of social citizenship. ceaship in the United States are, of course, -—intemational as well as domestic. Nevertheless, ideological conceptions, such as contract, make it more difficult to develop public support for a welfare state, especially where the cultural mythology citizenship is highly developed, Marshall underestimated these ide- ‘ological difficulties. Should we conclude, then, that civil rights and social ip represents an urgent task, for pk social movements ‘What would it take to revivify soci new contractarianism? One be less property-centered, more solidaristic form. This would permit us to re- claim some of the moral and conceptual ground for social has been colonized by property and contract. We might try t0 recone somal liberties in terms that nurture rather than choke off social solidarity. Certainly we need to contest conservative and liberal claims that the preser- rights to social sup- port, Today, when rhetoric about the “triumph of democracy” accompanies social and economic devastation, it is time to insist that there can be mo democratic citizenship without social rights. Noves 1. TH. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class," in Class, Ciizenship, ‘and Social Development: Essays by T H. Marshall, &. Seymour Martin Lipset Hobbes 1 Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 3. Rogers M. Smith, “One United People: Second-Class Female Citizenship and the American Quest for Communit ‘Humanities 1, no. 2 (May 1989): 29-93, 4, Judith Shklar, American Cit (Cambridge, Mass : Harvard University Pre Yale Journal of Law and the ‘Quest for netusion Coneac versus CH 5, Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Saciat Theory inthe Aa he Family (ew York: Columbia Univer rs, 186) essays in Women, the State and Welfare, ed, Linda Gorton surance and Public ce: The Influence of Gender in Welfare Thought inthe United States, 1890-1935," American Historical Review 97, no, T (Feb. 1992),THE Cir GERSHON SHAFIR, EDITOR ™ IN| NE 's0 TA UNIversITy oF MINNESOTA PRESS Minneapolis * London