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Book Review
| Gretchen Ritter, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. 381. $70.00 cloth (ISBN 978-0-80-475378-4); $29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-80-475438-5).
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| Gretchen Ritter reinterprets how we should view the evolving concepts of citizenship in light of the gendered dimensions of constitutional jurisprudence. Constitutional law determines much more than fundamental political and governing principles; it creates and regulates social relations. Ritter believes that American constitutional development created a social order that "constrained and inspired democratic ambitions" of women (2). She focuses on the tensions in the twin ideals of women as domestic, dependent citizens and men as liberal individual citizens. Even today, women's historic definition as relational, dependent beings has prohibited their complete "attainment of liberal civic status" (3). Situating this constitutional conundrum in a theoretical framework as much as historical research, Ritter offers new insights from sources well trod by political and constitutional historians by drawing on social theory, feminist theory, and constitutional criticism. |
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The book is arranged thematically and chronologically, covering topics such as jury service, labor, war service, and privacy. Ritter begins by locating women historically as defined relationally to men through marriage. After the devastating legislative exclusion of women from the suffrage grant of the Fifteenth Amendment, courts fashioned a new constitutional order which restricted women's civic membership by denying their claims to liberal individualism. Ritter then situates the impact of the Nineteenth Amendment in racially segregated America, contending that the amendment did not "displace a constitutional order in which ... political rights were secondary to civil rights, and women's domestic roles shaped the terms of their civic membership" (53). By the time of the Nineteenth Amendment, suffrage no longer marked individuals' "overall civic status" (64). Here, Ritter works through a familiar string of protective legislation cases to demonstrate the continuing association between women, domesticity, and dependency. |
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In the next section, Ritter argues that military service elevated men as the embodiment of the liberal individual, although women's service during the Second World War did strengthen their claims to civil equality. Men's military service and veteran status trumped these gains, granting men social and political privileges based on participation in arenas from which women were largely excluded. Ritter's final section covers Second Wave feminism and the development of the privacy doctrine. Ritter finds a "puzzle" in the courts' use of privacy to pursue the principle of equality. It seemed to contradict feminist principles which made the personal political and failed to rely on the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause as did the legal victories overturning legalized racial segregation. The emphasis on privacy becomes clear when considered in light of "the historical practice of governing women's civic place through marriage law" (262). Here, Ritter makes an important intervention. Women were "never truly in a private situation" (279). Rather, the Court's rulings in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Roe v. Wade (1973) inserted doctors rather than husbands as third parties in a continuing legal tradition of protecting and guiding women at the expense of recognizing their legal autonomy. |
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Ritter concludes with a chapter titled "The Politics of Presence" in which she calls for mobilizing "women" as a strategic category of "public, embodied membership" (298). Embodied membership makes visible social and status differences. Liberal constitutionalism and attempts to achieve individual autonomy largely have failed. Instead, Ritter believes that citizenship located in embodiment will allow women to "control the terms of embodiment" and can bring "things that are positive and productive to civic membership" (309). Ritter asks us to imagine a new direction for attaining full democratic inclusion and has provided convincing analysis that previous strategies must be re-evaluated. This text is valuable for asking this question. How to achieve these goals without reverting to a particularized and deficient articulation of rights remains unclear. |
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This book marries—to use a loaded term—theory and history in the service of constitutional analysis. Ritter is at her most persuasive when she shows the limitations of changing legal and constitutional language that appeared to expand civil rights and participation. By approaching constitutional law as a template for social design, Ritter demonstrates how these language changes do not translate into full equality. My one quibble is that Ritter relies heavily, especially in the early chapters, on printed and official histories by women's rights advocates, such as Stanton, Anthony, and Gage's History of Woman Suffrage. While she identifies different topical areas in which women agitated for rights, rarely does she include sources which include how the different aspirations of working class women or women of color were in tension with or influenced the contours of the debates. The prose is at times dense, but overall clearly conveys her nuanced analysis, albeit in language probably more familiar to political scientists than to historians. Overall, this book is a provocative read, raising questions about the meanings of liberal individualism and the unfinished quest for women's full civic membership. |
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| Yvonne M. Pitts
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| Purdue University |
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