Marilyn Friedman

Women and citizenship

The notion of citizenship is complex; it can be at once an identity; a set of rights, privileges, and responsibilities; an elevated and exclusionary status, a relationship between individual and state, and more. In recent decades citizenship has attracted interdisciplinary attention, particularly with the transnational growth of Western capitalism. Yet citizenships relationship to gender has gone relatively unexplored-despite that throughout much of human history, women have been and continue to be denied citizenship, sometimes at even the lowest rank. This highly interdisciplinary volume explores the political and cultural dimensions of citizenship and their relevance to women and gender. Containing essays by a well-known group of scholars, including Iris Marion Young, Alison Jaggar, Martha Nussbaum, and Sandra Bartky, this book examines the conceptual issues and strategies at play in the feminist quest to give women full citizenship status. The contributors take a fresh look at the issues, going beyond conventional critiques, and examine problems in the political and social arrangements, practices, and conditions that diminish womens citizenship in various parts of the world, including both Western and undeveloped nations.

Educating for World Citizenship

Academic research and postsecondary education in the United States have witnessed, in recent decades, a host of controversial developments that critics regard as catastrophic. In literature courses, mediocre works of postmodernism, Afrocentrism, and feminism have replaced Western classics; ideals of truth, objectivity, and merit have been forsaken; unqualified women and minorities have usurped academic power which they use to annihilate dissenting voices; the ‘‘political correctness’’ police monitor everyone’s slightest remarks, and sexuality studies hawk a political agenda of unlimited sexual deviance. Not true, says Martha Nussbaum. With a particular emphasis on the humanities, her recent book, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education,1 presents a resounding defense of many of the new curricular changes. Nussbaum draws irrefutably on the very Western traditions that critics invoke to denounce the changes. The tradition of Socratic self-examination, for example, figures prominently in this defense. Nussbaum is not the first to have claimed that the tradition of critical reflection supports recent educational innovations.2 Nussbaum, however, develops the point at great length and showcases its classical pedigree. In addition, she expands this classics-based defense of multicultural education by situating critical reflection itself within a wider ideal that is also supported by classical sources. The wider ideal is a cosmopolitan education, an education for world citizenship. Thus, liberal education should aim at making students into ‘‘citizens of the World,’’ persons who can interact competently and respectfully

AUTONOMY AND MALE DOMINANCE

value or what really matters to us. Such fears can deeply affect our capacity to live and choose autonomously. In the face of threats from those we fear, we may have to devote ourselves to self-defense and, perhaps, even to simple self-preservation.1 Not only do a persons particular choices and actions change as a result of her fear of others; her entire character may become distorted by the need for heightened vigilance and frequent selfdefense. There are many situations and relationships in the world that put certain people in chronic fear of certain other people. One state makes war on another state, one ethnic group oppresses another ethnic group, one religious group crusades against another religious group, one racial group enslaves another racial group. These sorts of conflicts sometimes involve ruthless atrocities - death and suffering on a massive scale. Personal auton

Going Nowhere: Nagel on Normative Objectivity

In The View from Nowhere , Thomas Nagel develops a theory of practical reasoning which attempts to give the personal, or subjective, point of view its due2 while still insisting on the objectivity of ethics. On the objective side, Nagel affirms that there are truths about values and reasons for action which are independent of the ways in which reasons and values appear to us, independent of our own particular beliefs and inclinations (p. 144). The objective foundation for these truths consists in a certain distinctive process of understanding. Objective understanding is explicated in terms of an objective standpoint, a standpoint defined as impersonal, that is, as detached from the subjective point of view. The objective standpoint is structured by a conception ‘of the world as centerless—as containing ourselves and other beings with particular points of view’ (p. 140). As with scientific reasoning, ‘we begin from our position inside the world and try to transcend it by regarding what we find here as a sample of the whole’ (p. 141).