CITIZENSHIP INVOLVES RIGHTS AND OBLIGATIONS

Citizenship Involves Rights and Obligations

Citizenship Involves Rights and Obligations: A Discussion

Introduction

Citizenship refers to the status of being a citizen, usually enshrined in law. Citizenship may entail rights and responsibilities or result as a consequence of being part of a polity or community. In modern democratic states, the basis of citizenship is in having the capacity to participate in the electoral process. Participation entails a legal membership of a polity premised upon universal suffrage. Citizenship is a relationship between the state and the individual that comprises a series of rights and responsibilities. It may be defined objectively, as a legal status, or subjectively, as comprising a sense of belonging and identity. This paper discussesthe statement that 'Citizenship involves rights and obligations'.

Discussion

Cottrell (2003) mentions legal citizenship defines the opportunity to vote, stand for public office, and the right to live and work in a given state. However, possessing legal rights does not necessarily encompass all that it means to be a citizen. The term citizenship also entails a subjective component; that is, the sense of identity and belonging that accompanies the legal definition (Cottrell, 2003). Hence, groups that feel alienated may well define themselves as “second-class” citizens. That is, while their entitlements are enshrined in legislation, and legally they are full citizens, the subjective component is not evident.

Discussion

Rights talk has dominated the language of citizenship in the United States. In the nineteenth century, married women sought the right to control their own property, while a diverse coalition crusaded for the right to vote. In the twentieth, poor single mothers called for the right to a guaranteed income, while others demanded the right not to become mothers at all. Only opponents of social welfare have stressed obligations over rights, the individual's responsibility to earn and not merely receive benefits. That is (Cottrell, 2003), until historian Linda K. Kerber set about reshaping the narrative of American political development by investigating not the rights of citizens but their obligations: duties the state compels its members to perform or suffer punishment.

In 1967, Kerber tells us, her husband, "whose sociological profile is virtually the same as mine," boarded a bus for a war that they both "believed to be immoral," while she returned home to "wait out the war in physical if not emotional safety." Out of this personal trauma, she confesses, "my need to write this book was born." The result is a stunning reappraisal of citizenship that peels away its gender-neutral mask. Wherever the state compels men to tread, Kerber would have women be required to go (Greetham, 2001), lest their citizenship be worth less than men's.

No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies dramatizes political theory through a series of five episodes, spanning the centuries from the American Revolution to the 1980s. No paean to uninterrupted progress, it offers "a set of complex accounts, often circling on themselves" in which difference persistently breeds inequality, albeit in new forms. This is microhistory at its most persuasive, a close narration of discrete events ...