Jennifer Tupper
University of Alberta
Abstract
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This paper examines the limitations of citizenship as it is currently constructed in social studies curriculum. Traditional 'masculine' understandings of citizenship appear to permeate social studies content and are lived in public spaces within the boundaries of the nation state. The discussion clearly indicates the need to use gender and difference as categories of analysis in the creation of a more inclusive understanding of citizenship. |
Introduction
Since its inception as a subject area, citizenship goals have been central to social studies. The Alberta Program of Studies (2000, p.3) states that "responsible citizenship is the ultimate goal of social studies." As a social studies teacher, and a feminist, I am aware that the concept of responsible citizenship informing curriculum in Alberta has been narrowly constructed. Gender and difference are not currently central questions in citizenship education, and understandings of what constitute citizenship appear to live within the boundaries of the nation state. In this discussion, my aim is to examine the gendered nature of citizenship, which appears to inform social studies curriculum in Alberta. Through an exploration of citizenship as it is manifest in the content and objectives of high school social studies, I hope to provide social studies educators with a deeper understanding of the limitations around the construction of citizenship in social studies curriculum.
Contesting Citizenship
Because it is a historically masculine and often undemocratic construction, citizenship has become a contested concept. British theorist T. H. Marshall (1950) defined citizenship as full membership in a community. From his perspective, citizenship is a universal construct in which difference is rendered invisible. Marshall's understanding of citizenship as universal is supported by liberal theories of citizenship which reduce it to merely legal status through identification of the rights that an individual holds within the state. Theoretically, all individuals have universal access to these rights by virtue of their membership in a state. In keeping with this understanding, Lister (1993, p.3) suggests that citizenship is "membership of a community and the relationship between individuals and the state and between individual citizens within that community." Rian Voet (1998, p.1) suggests that liberal theories of citizenship
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…tell us that equal and full citizenship for all adults born within the territory of the state already exists. It tells us that with the disappearance of feudalism and slavery, and the inclusion of all adults in suffrage, political inequality has also been eliminated. After all, as far as public life is concerned, all members of western societies have an equal status and possess equal rights. |
However, Voet (1998) is critical of liberal theories of citizenship because while citizenship may be universal in theory, it has not been universal in practice. This is especially true for women and members of minority groups throughout history who have been 'created' as marginalized members of a nation governed by a state and prevented from full membership in communities.
Citizenship may also be understood as a series of dichotomies, including public / private, individual / community, male / female, justice / care, rights / responsibilities, to be a citizen / to act as a citizen, which establish inequities in that one is always valued over the other. For example, in the formal curriculum of social studies in Alberta, students learn about justice as a public phenomena, but there are no knowledge objectives in which the study of care as an element of citizenship is listed. Because of this, the conclusion might be made that the concept of justice is more valued than that of care. Similarly, students learn about politics in the public realm, but the curriculum does not require that they learn about the private realm as a political construction (Alberta Learning, 2000). Both the private realm and the concept of care are traditionally associated with the feminine, while the public realm and the concept of justice are associated with the masculine. In the context of the social studies curriculum it would appear that what is worth learning is most closely associated with what has traditionally been considered "masculine".
Historically, citizenship has been understood in relation to the nation-state. Through our service to the real state and the imaginary nation, our identities as citizens are manifest. For women, service to the nation was realized through reproduction as they became "mothers of the nation" or "mothers of citizens" (Vogel, 1991, p. 63). Feminists maintain that it is a dominant group of elite political actors - white, heterosexual, bourgeois, European men - that we most commonly associate with service to the state (Jones, 1997, Bickford, 1997). This has become one of the dominant models for understanding citizenship. Nowhere in the Alberta Program of Studies for grades 10-12 does the word "mother(s)" appear unless it is in the context of the "mother land" (Alberta Learning, 2000). However, the study of white, European men permeates the content at all three grade levels in high school curriculum. In grade 10 students learn about John A. MacDonald and the Fathers of Confederation; Napolean is a key figure in grade 11 content; and Karl Marx and Adam Smith are found throughout the grade 12 curriculum (Alberta Learning, 2000).
Digging up the roots of citizenship
Gender and citizenship have been inextricably linked since Aristotle conceived of citizenship in relation to participation in the public arena. Specifically, he articulated an understanding of citizenship in relation to the polis or involvement in politics. He also suggested that acts of citizenship necessarily required rationality (Stone, 1996). This marks the creation of the first of the many dichotomies surrounding citizenship. Rationality, associated with men, was valued over emotion and passion, associated with women. Political activity existed in public spaces to be accessed by men only. Women and slaves were to engage in activity in the private familial realm, granting men the flexibility to take part in political activity, relieved of all other burdens. Thus, formal citizenship was lived in exclusive, homogenized spaces by white bourgeois men, and relationships between public and private were mediated by class, race, and gender.
Lister (1997, p.6) maintains that "the public-private divide is pivotal to women's longstanding exclusion from full citizenship in both theory and practice." As long as women were denied participation in public realms, they were treated as second class citizens. So citizenship for women is often about invisibility and inferiority. The public is valued to the extent that the private is not and the unpaid work of women in the home is perhaps one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century. The tragedy is perpetuated because the curriculum does not create a clearly identifiable space for taking this up with students.
Where the public and private became the historical domains for struggle over citizenship, social studies classrooms can be viewed as the symbolic domain for struggles over citizenship. Because curriculum is controlled by the 'state' what students learn is very much in the realm of the public. Lessons about government and market take place in virtually every grade at the high school level, with students engaging in an in depth study of government in grade 10 and market systems in grade 12 (Alberta Learning, 2000). Because the state and education are not separate entities, the possibility of addressing both private and public concerns within a single arena may not be realized. Elaine Unterhalter (1999) maintains that education is itself a performance, an acting out of citizenship, so there is room to negotiate narratives based on difference. If we look at current social studies curriculum in this country, it is apparent that difference rarely informs the dominant narrative students learn. This narrative is based almost entirely upon the Western masculinized canon of politics, economics, and conflict. It is left up to the teacher to deconstruct this understanding of citizenship implicit in curriculum and textbooks.
The 'Rationality' and 'Universality' of Citizenship
The Alberta Program of Studies (2000, p. 3) for grades 10, 11, and 12 states under general learner expectations that responsible citizenship involves "participating constructively in the democratic process by making rational decisions" (my emphasis). Rationality has been an integral part of liberal understandings of citizenship and is manifest in social studies via study of participation in the political decision making process through such acts as voting. Since suffrage is "universal" in Canada, it would seem appropriate that the general learner expectation of rational decision-making be linked to voting. However, there is no guarantee that political inequality has been eliminated because all individuals over a certain age who have resided in Canada for a designated period of time are permitted to vote. This is especially apparent if what is political is understood beyond the realm of politics. What I mean here is that voting does not guarantee access to other forms of participation in the public realm. Further to this, some feminists have argued that one of the greatest paradoxes of modernity was the moment of 'universal' emancipation as the moment of female subordination and exclusion (Nuval-Davis & Werbner, 1999).
There was nothing universal about universal emancipation for it continued to allow only men to vote, but ceased to deny the franchise to those who did not own property. This suggests that citizenship is a status more than it is a practice, and the status is not universally bestowed on each member of a nation. In addition, there are obvious contradiction between states' constitutional declarations of equal citizenship and the historical treatment of women as the possessions of their husbands or communities (Pettman, 1999). Yet students in social studies encounter the notion that citizenship is universal because all adults are included in suffrage, and all adults are bestowed with certain rights by the state. The curriculum fails to interrogate the political outside of the realm of politics, missing the inequities inherent in citizenship as status. It lags behind the scholarship on citizenship which has articulated the assumption that once suffrage was achieved for all disenfranchised groups, all citizens became equal members of the political community (Yuval-Davis & Werbner, 1999).
While students learn about their own rights as members of the state, and are expected to fulfil certain obligations in light of these rights, the curriculum does not provide an interrogation of citizenship as a gendered construct. To illustrate this point, one need only to examine the content of Grade 10 social studies in Alberta. In Theme I: Sovereignty, students learn about service to the state through enlistment in military service. They are required to know the concept of nation-state and Canada's role in World War I (Alberta Program of studies, p. 10). Since it was men who fought in the First World War, they become implicitly characterized as the border guards of national collectivities. These men, after all, were protecting the nation from forces of evil and imperialism. Women are not characterized as border guards of the nation, yet it is through their reproductive capacities that they protect and guard the nation in both times of war and of peace. The territorial notion of statehood suggests that it was the need to safeguard fundamental resources, including women's reproductive capacity, which prevented them from fighting. However, this is not mentioned in curriculum content (Alberta Learning, 2000). The "safeguarding" of resources reduces women to objects and fails to acknowledge their role in defending the nation.
The curriculum also does not appear to question the value of rational thought, which is inextricably linked to citizenship. Responsible citizenship in social studies, as previously noted, is about reasoned / rational thought, and there is little room to consider other forms of thought equally valuable and productive. In fact, no other ways of being are mentioned at all (Alberta Learning, 2000). Bickford (1997) argues that a political ethic should focus not just on responsibility or rationality, but also on anger and courage. While anger may be reactive, it is a response to injustice and its object is change. She suggests that this is what democratic citizenship needs to entail - a productive anger. A challenge for social studies teachers is in working with students to realize a productive anger through active citizenship. Anger is a call to action, a moving away from passive citizenship, which some have maintained, is exactly what social studies curriculum fosters - passive or "responsible" membership in a state in exchange for rights and protection (Osborne, 1997). Historically, women have used their anger in response to masculinized citizenship. They have organized to fight inequities, both in the public and private spheres, and have drawn attention to the personal as a political manifestation. Students have the same potential to interrogate inequities and articulate their anger with precision as a means of engaging in a truly democratic citizenship.
Studies exploring the way in which women have historically responded to injustice with productive anger may serve as useful models for students engaging in more than passive citizenship. For example, historically women's obligations were rooted in service to the family, and if single, commitment to the state. The story of the Smith sisters, living in New York in the 1800s, illustrates how citizenship was understood in terms of obligation to the state. Despite the fact that that Abby and Julia Smith could not vote, they were still expected to pay taxes on the property they owned. This troubled them as they felt that taxation should be contingent upon representation. Since they could not vote, they had no representation, thus should not be taxed. Those who could vote but did not hold property were not taxed. The course of action the sisters chose was to withhold their taxes as a form of protest. While there were people in the community who supported their protest, the town council began to seize the sisters' possessions in order to compensate for the money owing. Eventually, the sisters had to acquiesce or loose everything (Kerber, 1998).
The irony inherent in this story is that although the sisters were considered to be citizens of the state because they owned property, they could not exercise all the rights of full citizenship. They were denied access to participation in decision-making through the act of casting a ballot. For Abby and Julia Smith, citizenship depended upon an obligation to pay taxes. But that is where citizenship ended. Stories such as this one are useful examples of the gendered nature of citizenship throughout history and could easily be taken up in social studies classes.
Neo-liberal conceptions of citizenship reinforce the importance of consuming public goods and acting upon self-interested motivations (Voet, 1998). In social studies, students may come to understand, through their encounters with curriculum (a political document) that capitalism is the most valuable economic system, especially since the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union. Capitalism encourages self-interest through production, consumption, and the possibility of transgressing the boundaries of social class through individual effort. An approach to citizenship such as this does not identify the dominating and productive power of capitalism, organized along the lines of gender, class, and race. In its failure to identify these inequities, they are reproduced, and the irony is that this form of citizenship is perhaps the least 'responsible' of all.
Another way that the individualist neo-liberal ideology of citizenship is manifest in social studies is via the Diploma Exams. If we are to understand the actions of citizenship as informed by self-interest, then these exams lend to this understanding. A competitive individualist culture is sustained as students prepare to write diploma exams and establish the norms of success, which exclude students who are less apt at writing this type of exam. The success of some students depends upon the failure of others, an ideology found not just in the place of schools, but in local communities, larger society, and in neo-liberal economic theory. These ideologies have the potential to result in widening social inequalities. That female students do not have the same success rate as their male counterparts is evidence of this (Walter & Young, 1997).
Rethinking Citizenship
Given the gendered nature of citizenship permeating social studies curriculum, it is perhaps time to move away from "responsible citizenship" as the central organizer of social studies objectives and outcomes. Citizenship is about occupying both public and private spaces, not just engaging in activities that contribute to the stability of the nation-state. Voting, abiding by laws, and engaging in paid labour are not the only acts that contribute to community and country. There is a need to provide students access to what Chantal Mouffe (1992, p.376) calls the "articulation of an ensemble subject position, corresponding to the multiplicity of social relations in which it is inscribed." This means that when students engage in social studies content, they are exposed to a myriad of experiences in which the intersections of gender, race, class and culture all contribute to the experiences of citizenship. Since the way that we engage in citizenship depends upon the way in which we understand our own subjectivities, it is important for students to value acts of citizenship that transcend traditional masculinized notions.
Social studies teachers committed to interrupting the gendered nature of citizenship inherent in curriculum may choose to embrace citizenship as a category of analysis in social studies discourse. Different political and economic systems serve as categories of analysis in grade 12 social studies, why not citizenship? When students learn discrete pieces of information pertaining to history, civics, geography, etc., using alternative understandings of citizenship to interrogate content and the varying experiences of individuals over time will likely move students toward a richer and more productive understanding of the world.
References
Alberta Learning (2000). Social Studies 10-20-30 program of studies. www.learning.gov.ab.ca/k_12/curriculum/.
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Lister, R. (1997). Dialectics of citizenship. Hypatia. 12(4), pp. 6-20.
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Voet, R. (1998). Feminism and citizenship. London: Sage Publications.
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Walter, C. & Young, B. (1997). Gender bias in Alberta social studies 30 examinations: Cause and effect. Canadian social studies, 31(2), pp. 83-86.
Yuval-Davis, N., & Werbner, P. (1999). Women, citizenship and difference. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Jennifer Tupper is a doctoral student in the Department of Secondary Education at the University of Alberta. Her research explores issues of representation, gender, and citizenship in social studies curriculum.