Citizenship and Gender: Theoretical Approaches and Historical Legacies

Recently, citizenship has become a popular concept in different countries. This article explores the reasons why citizenship has become such a 'catch-all' concept, and analyses the relation between gender and citizen ship. Throughout history, we distinguish three vocabularies of citizenship: civic-republican, liberal and communitarian. As we show, they each have advantages and disadvantages from a gender perspective, some of which crop up in current debates on citizenship, as the brief cross-national analysis of the other articles in this issue shows. © 1998 Critical Social Policy 56.