Modes of Labor and Access to Citizenship: Looking beyond Judith Shklar

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Thirty-five years ago, Judith Shklar’s Tanner Lectures, “American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion” identified the right to work as a defining social right and a key marker of public respect and civic belonging. In America, Shklar said, “one worked for oneself and for the community simultaneously” [420]. Shklar wrote about having the right to hold a job, but even for those who did work, their work might not be recognizable nor visible as work. Women, Blacks, and certain groups of immigrants, for example, sought equal citizenship as they performed labor and contributed to the public weal but were often excluded either because of who they were or what kind of work they did. Their work failed to convey public respect and civic belonging. Engaging historical and theoretical perspectives, this panel focuses on how performance of certain kinds of work—modes of labor —failed certain groups in the polity who were seeking markers of equal civic status.
While Shklar points to Machiavelli’s ideal, patriotic citizen-soldier, “possessed of all the military qualities of readiness to fight and to sacrifice his personal interests for the sake of the military glory of his native land,” [390] Julie Novkov documents that many of those who fought and sacrificed in this way were also denied citizenship. Similarly, Shklar contends that slavery was incompatible with citizenship; honorable labor was free labor, and “a free remunerated worker . . . is rewarded for the actual work he has done” [426, 414], yet as Kathleen Sullivan focuses on merchant seamen, she finds that they had liminal status. They could be impressed, held to service for long periods of time, held for debt, and restricted while on land. By the latter part of the 19th century, many American women had to leave home to work in factories, in shops, or as domestic laborers, while middle-class women were confined to volunteer activities and charitable endeavors. Carol Nackenoff explores how working-class women—and working mothers in particular—created an uncomfortable problem for feminists who had embraced maternalist rhetoric and who identified particular kinds of civic work for which women were ideally suited. While maternalism helped women win the vote, it also generated policy solutions (such as mothers’ pensions, designed to allow some mothers stay at home to raise their children) that did not benefit many working mothers, especially Black ones. Notably, Shklar omits analyzing the place of reproductive labor in relationship to citizenship. Eileen McDonagh, looking beyond Shklar, addresses this void by investigating women’s political inclusion as a consequence of how two modes of labor, reproductive labor and productive labor, are attached or detached from four regime modes: Athenian democracy, the monarchical state, the liberal state, and the contemporary welfare state. She argues that women’s political citizenship increases to the degree that the public and political elites view reproductive labor as consonant with the principles of government.

Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Exclusion. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at the University of Utah, May 1-2, 1989. https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/s/shklar90.pdf

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Individual Presentations

• Fighting to Be American: From the Civil War through World War I - Julie L. Novkov, University at Albany, SUNY

• Free and Efficient Seamen: Labor Mobilization of U.S. Sailors, 1866-1920 - Kathleen S. Sullivan, Ohio University

• Early 20th Century Feminism’s Long Legacy for Working Women - Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College

• Re-Productive Labor and Women’s Political Inclusion: A Typology of Four Regimes - Eileen McDonagh, Northeastern University

Chair

• Bartholomew H. Sparrow The University of Texas at Austin

Discussants

• Jeffrey Broxmeyer University of Toledo

• Bartholomew H. Sparrow The University of Texas at Austin