Women's community work challenges market citizenship

Abstract

This article examines the connection between women's community provisioning work and their participation in citizenship activities that seek to alter an inequitable distribution of rights and resources. As neo-liberal policy regimes restructure the collective work of women, we explore whether women's community work has become a substitute for public resources or whether it serves as a fundamental challenge to an individualization of citizenship by reconnecting citizenship and social rights. We draw on interview and focus group data from a multi-year year investigation of what supports and what limits the provisioning work women perform in six community organizations in Canada serving vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Three connections between citizenship activities and community provisioning are discussed: how women challenge notions of the worthy citizen; how they bring privatized need back into the public arena; and how they move from solidarity to advocacy.

Keywords:

• community
• citizenship
• provisioning
• women's work

Notes

1. The systemic under-funding of the non-profit community sector (Eakin, 2004) has been compounded by a shift from funding the general mission of organizations to funding specific, short-term projects resulting in much more staff time spent in project proposal writing and demonstrating effective, efficient outcomes (Arai & Reid, 2003; Ilcan & Basok, 2004; Richmond & Shields, 2004). The consequences of this shift are instability, volatile funding and huge swings in revenue (Scott, 2003).

2. This goal has recently been quietly added back to the SWC's mandate and the description now includes “work to advance equality for women.”

3. Molyneux, whose distinction between practical and strategic interests has been used extensively, takes up the ways in which this distinction has been used (1998) in response to critiques of it. Molyneux affirms that strategic interests are defined as those “involving claims to transform social relations in order to enhance women's position and to secure a more lasting re-positioning of women within the gender order and society” and practical interests are defined as those based on the “satisfaction of needs arising from women's placement within the sexual division of labour” (p. 232). Molyneux asserts that in some cases these distinctions have been applied in a way that assumes a too rigid and hierarchical character with practical interests set against strategic in a way that masks the links between them.