A Woman's Right to Choose to Be a Citizen ALL EDITIONS

• Published in: Newsday
• Main Author: By Elizabeth Blackmar. Elizabeth Blackmar is a professor of history at Columbia University
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 05.11.1998
• Edition: Combined editions

Equal citizenship entails obligations as well as rights. In a rights-conscious era, this basic truth provides a fresh way of looking at women's history. [Linda K.] Kerber identifies five fundamental duties of American citizens: the obligation to be loyal to the country, to pay taxes, to serve on juries, to defend the nation and - the most elusive - to engage in productive work, and uses them as a jumping-off point for an engaging study of 200 years of debate over the meaning of American women's citizenship. Devoting a chapter to each duty, Kerber lucidly traces its political and legal history and then shows how the "privilege" of exemption from civic obligations placed American women at a disadvantage when claiming equal rights. Throughout she tells remarkable stories of ordinary Americans who often surprised themselves by deciding to fight for civil equality. In the early republic, the exclusion of American women from duties of citizenship rested on a logic that said they owed their first loyalty not to the state but to their husbands or fathers. According to 18th-Century common law, a wife lived under the civil protection of her husband. Thus, judges ruled, wives who fled the country with their Loyalist husbands during the American Revolution had been legally unable to express their own independent political loyalty to the new nation.