Page 152 - Contemporary Political Sociology Globalization Politics and Power

138 Citizenship

times. From our vantage point in the twenty - first century, it is clear that
citizenship rights are an important object of cultural politics. Continually

contested, they can never be finally secured and they certainly do not
develop according to an inherent logic.
The implicit evolutionism of Marshall ’ s account is linked to another
problem: he apparently assumed that the development of citizenship rights
took the same form in all countries. Marshall ’ s history of the development
of citizenship rights is a description of British society. However, he is, at
the same time, proposing a general model of the development of the rela-
tion between citizenship and class in capitalist societies. It is implicit,
therefore, that the British case is not unique, but representative of all
capitalist societies. This is an unwarranted assumption which is not borne
out by the development of citizenship in other countries (Turner, 1990 ).
In the case of the US, Michael Mann argues that because political rights
were granted to the working class much earlier than in Britain, before the
labor movement was strong enough to offer a real challenge to the ruling
class, workers formed interest groups within the political constitution and
party system (Mann, 1996 ). As a result, social rights were already under -
developed in the US before neo - liberal globalization. Scandinavia is at the
other extreme, where welfare provision has been much more comprehen-
sive and generous, shaped by a strong socialist party, trades unions, and
farmers ’ organizations early in the twentieth century (Stephens, 1996 ).
From the point of view of social movements, there is a still more impor-
tant aspect of Marshall ’ s universalism: he assumes that citizenship rights
within a society are genuinely universal and confer equality upon citizens.
The most theoretically elaborated challenge to this view has come from
feminists. It is not that Marshall ignores the differences between the sexes
altogether; in his account of the historical development of rights, he does
mention the way in which women ’ s citizenship advanced at a slower rate
than men ’ s – in relation to winning the vote, for example. However, as
Sylvia Walby (1994) has argued, Marshall ’ s analysis of citizenship rights
is so imbued with gender - specific assumptions that he fails to notice that

the development of women ’ s rights has actually followed quite a different
trajectory from men ’ s, in some respects to a different end point, even in
the British case. As an example, she points out that women had very few
civil rights until they were gained as part of the wider struggle for political
rights in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the right to own
property, to professional employment, not to be beaten by a husband,
to terminate a marriage, and so on. Some were not won until after politi-
cal rights, thus reversing the development Marshall proposes for all
citizens. Furthermore, Walby argues that some still have not been won