Abstract

With gender as its central focus, this book offers a transnational, multi-faceted understanding of citizenship as legislated, imagined, and exercised since the late eighteenth century. Framed around three crosscutting themes - agency, space and borders - leading scholars demonstrate what historians can bring to the study of citizenship and its evolving relationship with the theory and practice of democracy, and how we can make the concept of citizenship operational for studying past societies and cultures.

The essays examine the past interactions of women and men with public authorities, their participation in civic life within various kinds of polities and the meanings they attached to their actions. In analyzing the way gender operated both to promote and to inhibit civic consciousness, action, and practice, this book advances our knowledge about the history of citizenship and the evolution of the modern state.

Rachel Fuchs is Regents' Professor of History Emerita at Arizona State University, USA. Her publications focus on women, children, paternity and the family within the context of the state, law, medicine and social welfare in modern France.

Anne Epstein is a historian, project researcher and adjunct lecturer based in Helsinki, Finland. She has taught at the Universities of Helsinki and Jyväskylä In Finland, and at the Strasbourg Institute of Political Studies, Science Po Paris, and the University of Strasbourg in France, where she remains affiliated with the research unit SAGE (Societies, Actors, Government in Europe).