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Citizenship 139

today – the right to abortion, for example, she sees as a fundamental civil
right to control over one ’ s own body – while social rights to difference
and equality are, as we will see in section 4.3 , inherently problematic for
women where the male norm continues to be taken for granted. Similar
points may be made in relation to all those who do not conform to the
norm of citizenship. A striking example is the black civil rights movement
in the US, campaigning for freedom of the person, equality before the
law, and economic freedom for Southern blacks about a hundred years
after they had been formally accorded American citizenship with the
ending of slavery (Morris, 1993 ). As we will see in section 4.4 , it is argu-
able that the lack of seriousness with which the judicial system treats
racial harassment means that black citizens still do not have freedom of
the person.
Marshall ’ s assumptions concerning the normal citizen and the univer-
salism of citizenship rights have also increasingly come to be seen as
problematic in relation to culture. What is meant by “ culture ” in this
context is highly complex, but, assuming homogeneity amongst citizens
in terms of life - style choices, national origins, history, and language,
Marshall simply collapses cultural into social rights. For Marshall ’ s con-
temporaries, the enjoyment of rights to “ live the life of a civilised being ”
included a cultural component, rights to public museums and heritage
sites, state subsidized arts, and perhaps most importantly in Britain, the
BBC, the public broadcasting service paid for by viewers and listeners that
expanded massively in the post - war period. “ Culture ” is multifaceted
here, including national culture, the memorialization of the nation ’ s
history; high culture, “ the works and practices of intellectual and espe-
cially artistic activity ” (Williams quoted in Jordan and Weedon, 1995 :
6 – 8); and, to a lesser extent, popular culture, too: the BBC ’ s ideal was
to “ inform, educate, and entertain. ” In Britain and virtually everywhere
else, any secure sense of cultural value has been disrupted, as absolute
distinctions between high and low culture have come into question (Is
Bob Dylan ’ s poetry as good as Keats? Is an unmade bed really Art?), and
globalization brings people, images, and ideas from different places and
“ societal cultures ” together in multicultural societies. As a result, in
commonsense terms, “ culture ” has become virtually indistinguishable
from notions of “ cultural difference ” (and, critics would say “ cultural
relativism, ” the view that cultural norms are of equal value). The most
concrete effect of debates around cultural difference in relation to citizen-
ship rights has been the remaking of national identities as multicultural,
and the understanding that different groups in society may need different
“ cultural rights. ” Marshall ’ s schema of civil, political, and social must,