8/14/2003
4
As we shall argue, what is missing in both republican and feminist discourses is a
sufficiently careful parsing of the historical and conceptual intersections and
transformations in gender and civic identity, and this essay is meant as a partial corrective
to that deficiency. Our conclusion is that feminism can make a significant contribution to
the realization of a healthy and robust civic life – if feminists will appropriate republican
arguments about the gender identity of citizenship, and if republicans will heed the
demurrals of feminists about masculinized aspects of citizenship.
To make good this (seemingly paradoxical) argument, our thesis is that in the
early modern period, and the rise of ‘commercial society,’ a subtle but nonetheless
profound reconstitution of gender categories was set into motion, the full effect of which
we are now seeing in the civic pathologies of liberal polities. The effect of this change,
vigorously debated throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, made
traditional gender categories problematic as ‘masculinity’ was redefined to complement
the emerging imperatives of ‘commercial society.’ As the requisites of private interest
became the basis of public action, masculinity was remade to encompass these interests.
Dispositions previously denounced as ‘effeminate’ in the republican tradition now came
to define the characteristics of the dominant gender. At the same time, femininity was
reconstituted to absorb into the private sphere those dispositions and commitments --
especially affective, emotional attachments to family, friends, and community – that had
characterized the engaged citizen in the republican tradition.
The trajectory of this change was that modern ‘man’ became interested where
republican ‘man’ had been self-sacrificing, and ‘women’ changed from threatening the
public with concerns of interest, to threatening the public with the concerns of communal
Convention