Gender has been a recurrent theme in this volume. But in order to understand the different genderings of active citizenship, we need to look at differences between the political projects involved (see chapter 1). Looking across this volume as a whole, it is evident that such political projects – however diverse – are transforming public and private responsibilities. The recurrence of this classic feminist theme of public/private throughout this volume urges us to examine more closely the gendering and re-gendering of active citizenship as a governmental construct, as well as a recurrent thread in the personal lives and choices of women.

In this chapter we trace active citizenship as a set of relationships that reconfigure public and private, personal and political. We disentangle the public-private dichotomy by elucidating four different sets of concepts that this dichotomy points to. By drawing on these we hope to elaborate a feminist politics of active citizenship.

The idea that we engage with is that there has been – and continues to be – a marked shift from public to private. This resonates with an extensive (feminist and non-feminist) body of scholarship on the rise of the ‘New Right’ and the transformations of welfare. For example, Mayer (2008) traces the crafting of a new conservative consensus on welfare reform from the 1970s onwards in the US. She argues that the conservative reform project displaced the previous liberal understandings of citizenship with a simultaneous communitisation and marketisation of public welfare institutions. Although there were significant differences between the reform projects of economic liberals and social conservatives, they were aligned through a common perspective on the public/ private dichotomy, she argues: social interaction was understood through a conceptual separation between a public sphere of action, regulated by the state, and a private sphere ‘in which individual citizens are free to exercise moral and political autonomy’ (2008: 171). Welfare reform, in the US and in the countries or regions considered in this volume, seeks to rework the relations of welfare around and through this distinction, shifting previously ‘public’ roles, services and identities to the ‘private’ domain, but maintaining the conceptual separation.

However, the conceptual separation is one that has been repeatedly challenged in feminist scholarship.