The Women's Civic History Project

Linda K. Kerber, May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History

Professor Kerber's interest in obligations of citizenship has been a fruitful inversion of the more traditional concern with rights. Her focus on "the obligations that the state has demanded of women" has helped her "clarify assumptions that Americans have made about the relationships between men, women and the state." Her research led her back to the bedrock of gender relations in public law and the experience of citizenship -- the "culture of coverture" which subsumes a married women's rights and responsibilities under her husband's. In her book, No Constitutional Right To Be Ladies: Women and Obligations of Citizenship, Kerber argues that this culture still influences American ideas and facts of citizenship in areas like the military draft, tax policy and recognition of same sex marriages.

Since the 1998 publication of No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, Linda Kerber has received high honors for the book and her body of scholarship in history. In 1999 the work was cited in a Supreme Court opinion in City of Chicago v. Morales.

In April, 1999 Kerber was honored by the Radcliffe College Board of Trustees with the first Radcliffe Award for Distinguished Academic Scholarship. Later that month Kerber was a guest on National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" whose topic was "individualism versus community in contemporary life." Sociologist Alan Wolfe and Daniel Yankelovich of DYG Inc., a public opinion research firm, were also guests on the program, which was hosted by Ray Suarez.

"A tour de force in every respect, and required reading for American historians and legal scholars, Kerber's new book is stunning," — Kirkus Reviews

The American Historical Association, in its January 2000 meeting, announced two prizes for No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, granted for the "best work in women's history and/or feminist theory" and the Littleton-Griswold Prize, awarded for the "best book in any subject on the history of American law and society."

"The book is powerfully written, evocative. I will never think of the history of citizenship the same way."—Sarah Barringer Gordon, University of Pennsylvania Law School

The Joan Kelly citation praised No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: "Combining micronarrative with feminist theorizing, impeccable research with passionate engagement, Linda Kerber reshapes the history of American political development by investigating the obligations, rather than rights of citizenship." The Littleton-Griswold prize noted that "Kerber's magnificent and highly readable book will change the ways in which we think about and teach the history of citizenship. … Kerber interweaves tales of emblematic trials with analysis of our tangled traditions of gender relations, never failing to discuss the legacies of past debates for contemporary civic practices."