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individualism, and women are systematically disenfranchised (in spite of their legal
equality) in a whole variety of ways because the practices and dispositions their lives
embody are not valued in liberal polities. Whatever else liberalism has explicitly
contributed to the enfranchisement of women in theory and practice, the fact of the matter
is that the articulated expressions of citizenship in liberal-democratic polities have hardly
been conducive to feminist political concerns.
Given the character of this critique, it is tempting to find complementary
theoretical and political positions in feminism and republicanism, and for two related
reasons. First, republicanism simply is the tradition in which the civic ideal and our
notions of citizenship-as-public- commitment took shape. Second, it is precisely the
substantive content of this civic ideal that has informed much of the criticism of civic life
in liberal polities, even, one could argue, feminist criticisms. For if the gender identity of
citizenship has been the contested terrain on which feminism has been constituted, the
feminist critique of liberal citizenship shows that the stakes in that contestation are in fact
informed by an ideal of commitment to the public good. If there is anything to be said
about the deficiencies of liberal citizenship, perhaps the most important is that women’s
lives and experiences may represent some of the most significant practices in liberal
polities where some notion of the public good remains more or less intact.
It does not however follow that fidelity to some defining principles of
republicanism, – like commitment to the public good, necessarily requires fidelity to
other defining principles of republicanism – like the gender identity of citizenship. In
fact, as Judith Vega aptly put it, “The feminist reception of classical republican thought
has testified to a profound pessimism with regard to the possibility of employing
Convention