Despite Hearn’s reminder that men stand at
the heart of citizenship as a gendered concept,
it is women who stand at the heart of
the literature on gendered citizenship. It is
essentially a feminist literature, written from
the perspective of women’s interests and
concerns, though increasingly acknowledging
that these are not uniform, given the
differences within the category ‘woman’. It
was feminist scholarship that demonstrated,
contra contemporary ‘malestream’ citizenship
theory, that women’s historical exclusion
from citizenship was far from accidental.
Feminist scholarship has also analysed the
gendered nature of the various components
of citizenship and has debated the value to
women of the main citizenship traditions
and the contemporary ‘vocabularies of
citizenship’ derived from them (Bussemaker
and Voet, 1998).