Mary Dietz has put forward a particularly
forceful exposition of participatory citizenship
in opposition to the ‘politically barren’
construction of the ‘citizen as bearer of
rights’ alone. Putting a feminist case for a
civic republican model of citizenship, she
argues that it is only when active political
participation is valued as an expression of
citizenship that feminists will ‘be able to
claim a truly liberatory politics of their own’
(1987: 13–15). Other feminist scholars,
sympathetic to Dietz’s vision, such as Anne
Phillips (1991, 1993) and Young (1990),
nevertheless advise a critical engagement
with civic republicanism. In particular, they
point to its narrow, formalistic conception
of politics and its failure to address the
domestic constraints on many women’s
political participation (even if these are
weakening in Scandinavian countries, see
Siim, 1999).