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affection. But masked by the subtle opacity rendered by the long passage of time, and by
the conceptual blinkers of gender hierarchy, these changes have only recently become
ascendant and obvious.
Our analytical plan is to first situate these issues in a brief review of extant
arguments about gender in modern liberal and republican (or ‘civic’) theory and practice.
Here we also establish the philosophical warrants for a feminist appropriation of
republican gender discourse generally, and the republican critique of effeminacy
specifically. In the second part of the essay, we examine the transformation of gender
constructions in the rise of modern commercial society, paying particular attention to the
gender implications of the arguments made by republican critics of modern commercial
society, and by modern critics of the civic tradition. In part three we bring these historical
insights to bear in a re-analysis of gender in the modern commercial polity. Using Susan
Faludi’s recent work, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, as our analytical guide,
we try to show that the ‘effeminacy’ of modern citizenship predicted by civic critics of
commercial society has in fact come to be embodied in the gender expectations of the
contemporary American male. Finally, in part four we conclude by discussing how this
argument bears on our understanding of gender identity in modern liberal democracies,
and how these considerations might be relevant for thinking through the ‘gender of
citizenship’ in efforts to revitalize modern civic life.
1. Liberalism, republicanism, and the gender of citizenship
Citizenship is arguably the defining issue of feminism. Feminism originated in the
struggle for women’s enfranchisement, and while securing the right to vote was (and
where it has not yet been realized, is) one of the first and most important goals of this
Convention