Book Review

Political rights and obligations are "reciprocal elements of citizenship." Yet citizenship is not a pair of scales in which rights and obligations serve as equalizing weights. The government may expand access to certain political rights without imposing new civic duties on the added recipients of those rights; it may also deny equal rights to equally obligated citizens. Linda K. Kerber's latest work makes these points while effectively dramatizing some of the perplexities of women's citizenship, particularly those effected by the negotiation and interpretation of women's civic obligations. Through the stories of people caught up in these dilemmas, Kerber demonstrates how women's obligations have been imperfectly appraised, their economic and political costs underestimated. Her exploration of the gendered nuances of civic obligation reveals the limitations of our past and present thinking about women and citizenship, an engagement that remains dominated by rights-focused analyses that often elide the related yet distinct history of women's public obligations.	1
Kerber's interest in women and the construction of their citizenship has produced a distinguished body of scholarship beginning with Women of the Republic (1980), which explored the civic endowments of women in the early national period. The republican mother, who featured so prominently in this earlier work, defined an idealized public role for the woman citizen. Statesmen extolled her virtues and her vital responsibilities to the new republic; yet provisioning the woman citizen to meet her civic duties did not include dispensing new political rights.	2
The opening chapter of No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies returns to those earliest postrevolutionary years, but the discussions of women's citizenship elicited by the chapter's featured legal cases could hardly be called celebrations of republican motherhood. Instead, they nurtured the impression that the nation's and state's demands on female citizens were barely consequential. By proposing that the feme covert's ability to express her loyalty to the United States—even to commit herself to citizenship—was mediated by her husband, some state courts seriously discounted the political element of women's performative citizenship. This dismissive treatment of women's obligations to the state threatened to leave women's rights in an equally reduced condition because, baldly put, little is given to those from whom little seems required.	3
However, as subsequent chapters remind us, even this reasoning could be discarded when the state's interest was served by declaring women publicly obligated citizens in some respects. Identifying property-owning women as full-fledged taxpayers was one of those circumstances. When the Smith sisters of Connecticut challenged the legitimacy of this practice in 1869, declaring (with a chorus of suffragists) that taxing voteless women was "taxation without representation," state officials could not evade the logic of that argument. Legal theory, however, rescued them from fully conceding the legitimacy of the suffragist position. The privilege of voting was not paired implicitly with the obligation to pay taxes, they countered; rather, the function of taxation was to provide for the general welfare. As citizens, the Smiths shared the benefits of that concern.	4
By the twentieth century, the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment had retired this particular debate, but the introduction of a federal income tax and the inevitable succession of tax laws created new problems for women with independent incomes, particularly married women. In the 1970s feminists attacked policies that discriminated against two-income families. Tax reforms in the 1960s and 1970s did reduce the severity of the "marriage penalty" for many households, but discrimination persists. While the obligation to pay taxes "is no longer filtered through husbands' 'virtual' representation of women in the political order," Kerber detects this notion still "embedded in the political economy of marriage."	. . .