Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Gender Equality
- Introduction
- PART I CONSTITUTIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART II POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART III SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- 10 Pregnancy and Social Citizenship
- 11 Equality: Still Illusive After All These Years
- 12 Razing the Citizen: Economic Inequality, Gender, and Marriage Tax Reform
- PART IV SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE CITIZENSHIP
- PART V GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- Suggested Readings
- Index
- References
12 - Razing the Citizen: Economic Inequality, Gender, and Marriage Tax Reform
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Gender Equality
- Introduction
- PART I CONSTITUTIONAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART II POLITICAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- PART III SOCIAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- 10 Pregnancy and Social Citizenship
- 11 Equality: Still Illusive After All These Years
- 12 Razing the Citizen: Economic Inequality, Gender, and Marriage Tax Reform
- PART IV SEXUAL AND REPRODUCTIVE CITIZENSHIP
- PART V GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP AND GENDER
- Suggested Readings
- Index
- References
Summary
Social citizenship ideals fall not only outside the bounds of fundamental constitutional rights, but also at the margins of plausible politics in the United States. Citizenship, in the prevailing view, confers the political and civil rights that ensure access to a democratic state and market. That view distinguishes rights to economic equality or socioeconomic security as peripheral, or even antagonistic, to the concerns of democratic government.
Indeed, over the last several decades, leading U.S. intellectuals and policy makers have designed and defended a citizenship vision linked to upward redistribution of economic resources. In this vision, economic inequality and widespread insecurity are necessary and natural to freedom and strength in state and market. Among mainstream leaders of law and politics, the response to this antisocial citizenship has been mostly acquiescence, obliviousness, or resignation, rather than sustained critical analysis or vigorous resistance.
This chapter links the failure of social citizenship ideals in the United States to a broader weakness in citizenship ideals – a weakness that is deeply related to gender ideology and practice. To better advance a vision of social citizenship, U.S. law and politics need a stronger vision, not just of economic equality, but of gender equality and of democracy in general. Feminist scholars have analyzed how ideas about gender help shape the common assumption that the costs of raising and sustaining capable, productive citizens are largely private family responsibilities. But ideas about gender also help to undermine egalitarian economic policy more generally.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Gender EqualityDimensions of Women's Equal Citizenship, pp. 267 - 286Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009
References
, “Efficiency and Social Citizenship: Challenging the Neoliberal Attack on the Welfare State,” 78 Ind. L. J.783, 805–06 (2003)Google Scholar
, “How High the Apple Pie? A Few Troubling Questions About Where, Why, and How the Burden of Care for Children Should Be Shifted,” 76 Chi-Kent L. Rev.1753–86 (2001)Google Scholar
, “Toward a Formative Project of Securing Freedom and Equality,” 85 Cornell L. Rev.1221, 1251–56 (2000)Google Scholar
, “The Modernization of Marital Status Law: Adjudicating Wives' Rights to Earnings, 1860–1930,” 82 Geo. L. J.2127, 2131 (1994)Google Scholar
, “Care as a Public Value: Linking Responsibility, Resources and Republicanism,” 76 Chi-Kent L. Rev.1673, 1677–90 (2001)Google Scholar
and , eds., 50th Anniversary Edition of the Report of the Committee on Economic Security of 1935 and Other Basic Documents Relating to the Development of the Social Security Act 56 (Washington, DC: Project on the Federal Social Role, 1985, 1985****)
, Regulating the Lives of Women: Social Welfare Policy From Colonial Times to the Present318–19 (Boston: South End Press, 1988)Google Scholar
, “The Family and the Market: A Study of Ideology and Legal Reform,” 96 Harv. L. Rev.1497–578 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “The Politics of Economics in Welfare Reform,” in and , eds., Feminism Confronts Homo Economicus: Gender, Law and Society (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), at 193, 199Google Scholar
, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever (New York: Basic Books, 2004), at 185Google Scholar
and , “Citizenship, Social Citizenship and the Defence of Welfare Provision,” 18 Br. J. Pol. Sci.415, 426–27 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Citizenship and Social Class, and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950)Google Scholar
, “The Coming Welfare Crisis,” in and , eds., Welfare: A Documentary History of U.S. Policy and Politics (New York: New York University Press, 2003), at 443–46Google Scholar
, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), at 40–51, 70–72, 83, 140–55Google Scholar
, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, a Brief History,” Harper's, Sept. 2004, at 31–41Google Scholar
, A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America (New York: Encounter Books, 2004), 23, 32–37Google Scholar
, The NeoConservatives: The Men Who Are Changing America's Politics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), at 53–56Google Scholar
and , The Commanding Heights: The Battle Between Government and the Marketplace That Is Remaking the Modern World (New York: Touchstone, 1998)Google Scholar
, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999)Google Scholar
, Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-First-Century America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005)Google Scholar
, Beggars and Choosers: How the Politics of Choice Shapes Adoption, Abortion and Welfare in the United States (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001)Google Scholar
, “Thinking With Wolves: Left Legal Theory After the Right's Rise,” 54 Buffalo L. Rev.1191, 1293 (2007)Google Scholar
, The Police Power: Patriarchy and the Foundations of American Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), at 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed. 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Don't Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Jct., VT: Chelsea Green, 2004), at 6–10Google Scholar
, “The Illusion of Efficiency in Workers' Compensation ‘Reform,’” 50 Rutgers L. Rev.657, 918–20 (1998)Google Scholar
, “Rhetoric of Risk and the Redistribution of Social Insurance,” in and , eds., Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), at 146, 164–66Google Scholar
, “Split Income and Separate Spheres: Tax Law and Gender Roles in the 1940s,” 6 Law and History Rev.259, 294–96 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, “Tax Policy and Feminism: Competing Goals and Institutional Choices,” 96 Colum. L. Rev.2001, 2015–18 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), at 188–98Google Scholar
, Man and Wife in America: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), at 115–22Google Scholar
, “Highlights of the 2003 Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act: Economic Stimulus or Long-Term Disaster?,” 64 La. L. Rev.219, 229–30 (2004)Google Scholar
, “The Marriage ‘Bonus’ Offers Little Tax Relief,” Washington Times, April 11, 2000, at E2Google Scholar
, “The Declining Progressivity of the Federal Income Tax,” in and , eds., Law and Class in America: Trends Since the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2006), at 163–90Google Scholar
and , “The Hefty Penalty on Marriage Facing Many Households With Children,” 15 Future of Children157, 159, 163 (2005)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
et al., The Expanding Reach of the Individual Alternative Minimum Tax (Washington, DC: Urban Institute and Brookings Institute, 2005), at 4–6Google Scholar
, The Individual Alternative Minimum Tax: Interaction With Marriage Penalty Relief and Other Tax Cuts (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, 2001), at CRS-7Google Scholar
and , The New Class Society: Goodbye American Dream? (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2nd ed. 2002), at 3–34Google Scholar
, The Great Risk Shift: The Assault on American Jobs, Families, Health Care, and Retirement (and How You Can Fight Back) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar
and , The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (New York: Basic Books, 2003), at 5–6Google Scholar
, One Nation, Underprivileged, Why American Poverty Affects Us All (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), at 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), at 78–86Google Scholar
, The Great American Jobs Scam: Corporate Tax Dodging and the Myth of Job Creation (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2005)Google Scholar
, The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2006)Google Scholar