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republicans encounter feminist thinkers evaluating proposals from the standpoint, “is this
good for women?” which seems to contradict the very spirit of republican commitment to
the collective good. Furthermore, feminist interest in a so-called “ethic of care” seems
only to reinforce one of the great dreads of republican thinking, that we have lost an
ability to distinguish public and private life. By this account, republicans fault feminists
because they cannot really distinguish public from private concerns and will reabsorb
public life into another sphere of private life and concerns. So despite the initial
similarities among these critiques, republicans and feminists have parted company
quickly when it comes to solving the problems of civic disengagement and “bad
citizens.”
Our intention in this essay is to reconstitute the terms of this conceptual and
political puzzle. Our hope is to resolve some of the tensions between feminism and
republicanism, and, while we cannot provide an account of what feminist republicanism
might look like in this paper, we will say something about what the terms for such a
solution might look like. In doing so, we hope to contribute to a more robust account of
how feminism – and women’s practices and roles – can revitalize civic life in the modern
democratic polity, and how republican concerns can broaden out certain aspects of
feminist thought. (This resolution also has profound implications for the ways that civic
life is understood in the current civic imperative, but we will have to leave it to another
occasion to address those implications. Here we shall primarily attend the issues on the
register of gender and citizenship, with the intention of addressing feminist concerns, and
showing how those concerns can improve upon current civic discourse).
Convention