Kate Nash 
A "Politics of Ideas" and Women's Citizenship 
Introduction 
The question this article will address is that of the role of ideas in the 
development of the social and political institutions of women's citizenship, 
historically and in future feminist strategies. There has been little direct 
consideration of this question on the part of feminist theorists, with the 
notable exception of Anne Phillips who introduced it in her recent work, 
The Politics of Presence. In this book she makes an interesting distinction 
between a conventional "politics of ideas", in which political representation 
is taken to involve the representation of party policies and voter preferences 
and beliefs, and a "politics of presence" in which democratic procedures 
are held to require the physical presence of members of social groups. For 
Phillips, the latter is required because while political equality entails the 
inclusion of voices previously excluded from the political process, it also 
requires an informed judgement of the probable outcome of that process, 
and she believes that the presence of members of historically disadvantaged 
groups could result in more egalitarian policies (Phillips 1995). Phillips is 
evidently using the term "politics of ideas" in a very particular way here and 
in this article I will open up the discussion of the relation between ideas and 
social and political practices to compare her theory with another view of 
how politics is conducted at the level of ideas, the theory of hegemony of 
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In order to do so we will look at the 
proposals that have been made by feminists concerning the relation between 
the ideas of liberalism and the institutions of women's citizenship in order 
to show that the theory of hegemony is best able to deal with the issues raised 
by this relation. Finally it will be argued that the politics of ideas proposed 
by Laclau and Mouffe is at least as important to feminist strategies to end 
the secondary status of women's citizenship as Phillips' "politics of presence". 
Filozofski vestnih, XVIII (2/1997), pp. 33-49. 33 
Kate Nash 
The feminist critique of liberal citizenship 
Since this paper is concerned with the empirical question of the extent 
to which ideas have affected, or could affect, social and political institutions, 
rather than normative questions concerning how citizenship should be ex-
panded to include women, we will take the historical theory of citizenship 
of T.H Marshall as our starting point. Marshall's basic argument is well-known 
and will not be outlined in detail here. According to his view, liberal rights 
have been extended since the beginning of capitalism. Civil rights to indi-
vidual freedom - to speech, the ownership or property, justice before the 
law and so on - were established in the eighteenth century, more or less. 
Political rights to participation in the exercise of political power were gained 
with the establishment of the modern parliamentary system in the nineteenth 
century. And finally, there was the institutionalisation of social rights to 
economic welfare and to participation in the social and cultural life of the 
nation with the establishment of the welfare state in the twentieth century 
(Marshall 1992). Although there is considerable controversy over Marshall's 
theory, particularly regarding its evolutionary logic and the question of its 
status as a model of the development of rights in liberal-democracies other 
than in Britain (Barbalet 1988, p. 30), it nevertheless provides distinctions 
between the different forms of rights which have been useful to feminist critics 
of women's citizenship in Western liberal-democracies. 
Theoretically, the most important point of the feminist critique of libe-
ral citizenship is that rights have to a large extent been developed from a 
male perspective so that they are inappropriate to women: on the one hand, 
women and men are treated alike when they should be treated differently; 
and on the other, women are sometimes treated differently from men, as 
inferior citizens. The first case is exemplified by civil and political rights. 
Here feminists have mainly focused on formal anti-discrimination rights 
which fail to take women's particular embodiment and circumstances into 
account; the right to equal pay, for example, which fails to recognise the 
occupational segregation of the sexes (Frazer and Lacey, 1993 pp. 78-88). 
The second case principally involves gender-differentiated welfare rights. As 
a group, women receive more welfare benefits than men, but there is a diffe-
rence in the type of benefits men and women are entitled to. There is a 
two-tiered welfare system in Britain and elsewhere: one tier consists of benefits 
to which citizens are entitled by virtue of insurance contributions paid on 
the basis of waged work; men are predominantly entitled to this type of 
benefits. The other consists of benefits which are not directly paid for by 
insurance contributions and these are predominantly received by women. 
34 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
They include benefits to which citizens are entitled by virtue of being the 
dependants of insurees, means-tested benefits for those in poverty and, in 
rare cases, benefits which are paid to those who have the main responsibil-
ity for the care of children or others who can not care for themselves in the 
home (Pateman 1989; Walby 1994). The type of welfare benefits which have 
greatest legitimacy and financial value are those received through work-re-
lated insurance; the other type is somewhat stigmatised, since they may be 
seen as unearned, and involves lower sums of money. Women's social citi-
zenship is, therefore, not just different from men's, but secondary. 
Feminists, like Marshall, tend to see citizenship in Western liberal-de-
mocracies as an extension of liberal rights. But for feminists, the fact that 
citizenship is liberal is closely related to the disadvantages it presents for 
women. Firstly, liberalism is concerned with gender-neutral individuals as 
the rights-bearing members of society. For the classical liberalism on which 
formal rights tend to be based, only universal principles which treat all in-
dividuals identically are acceptable. This makes it difficult for liberal legis-
lation to take differences between men and women into account, while in 
some cases, like the famous judgement in which it was ruled that a woman 
dismissed because she was pregnant was not discriminated against because 
the same treatment would have been accorded to a similarly situated man 
(Frazer and Lacey 1993, p. 81-2), it turns out the gender-neutral individual 
is actually a man. In actual fact, then, women are not always liberal indi-
viduals. In the case of social rights the matter is somewhat different; in this 
modified version of liberalism, which comes close to social-democracy, it is 
acceptable to treat different categories of citizens differently in order to 
ensure that minimal economic and social needs are met equally for all citi-
zens (Beveridge 1966, p. 45). But, as we have seen, it is the (male) indi-
vidual who is contracted to insure himself with the state through paid em-
ployment who is the privileged citizen; the (female) dependant of this male 
breadwinner is not directly insured with the state and is not a full citizen. 
Secondly, and closely linked to the first point, liberalism divides up society 
into public and private spheres, where the private sphere tends to be 
conflated with the home. For liberals the private sphere is outside the juris-
diction of the state, and when this is combined with the view that family re-
lations are natural and therefore somehow outside society altogether, it 
becomes very difficult for liberals to consider granting rights to women in 
the home (Kymlicka 1990, pp. 250-262). It is for this reason that it has proved 
so difficult to gain civil rights for women in the home, and no doubt why, 
although the welfare state does minimally recognise the workwomen do in 
the home, it is nevertheless seen as inferior to men's economic contribu-
35 
Kate Nash 
tion in the public sphere in terms of the quality and quantity of welfare 
benefits awarded on the basis of this "feminine" contribution. 
Liberalism as an ideology and women's citizenship 
Feminist criticisms of liberalism seem to suggest quite a close link be-
tween the ideas of liberalism as a political ideology and the development of 
women's secondary status as citizens. That is, they suggest the link between 
ideas and social and political institutions with which we are concerned here. 
However, the question of the precise nature of this relation has not been 
directly addressed by feminists. The following accounts are taken from femi-
nist analyses of liberal political philosophy; I am assuming that they can be 
applied to the more specific question of women's citizenship in a liberal 
society. On the basis of the problems these theories give rise to, it will be 
suggested that the theory of hegemony provides the best approach to un-
derstanding the relation between liberal ideology and the institutions of 
women's citizenship, even though it is not without problems of its own. 
The first account we will look at is derived from Marxism and sees lib-
eralism as capitalist ideology. In an article on seventeenth century liberal-
ism, Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman argue that the main tenets of lib-
eralism - individualism and the distinction between public and private spheres 
- were established in early modernity with the rise of capitalism and the 
subsequent shift of production out of the home, and with the liberal politi-
cal system which developed alongside it (Brennan and Pateman 1979). 
Brennan and Pateman deny that political theory can simply be seen as re-
flecting socio-economic changes; they suggest rather that liberalism is a 
necessary condition of capitalism: 
"Individuals can not be seen as freely entering contracts and making 
exchanges with each other in the market, and as able freely to pursue 
their interests, unless they have come to be conceived as free and equal 
to each other. Furthermore, unless they are seen in this fashion, they 
have no need voluntarily to agree to, or consent to, government or the 
exercise of authority." (Brennan and Pateman 1979, p. 184) 
Brennan and Pateman explicitly reject economic reductionism in re-
fusing to see ideology as determined by the economy; but in suggesting that 
liberalism is a necessary condition of capitalism as an economic system the 
problem nevertheless returns. And the economic reductionism which haunts 
Marxist theories of ideology, however nuanced, is problematic both from a 
36 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
general theoretical point of view and from the more particular point of view 
of the question of women's citizenship with which we are concerned. 
Firstly, if liberalism as an ideology is a necessary condition of the capi-
talist economy, then it is also part of that economy; it exists not simply as 
ideas but as the practices of capitalism in the form of contracts, the rules 
regulating exchanges and so on. In fact, although it is a feature of the Marxist 
theory of ideology that has been particularly drawn out by neo-Marxists, Marx 
himself made this point concerning the legal forms of capitalism, in par-
ticular the wage-form in which labour is "freely" exchanged as a commod-
ity. But for Marx, although real in their effects, these forms are at the same 
time merely a surface appearance concealing the essence of capitalism, the 
class struggle which takes place over the means of production. It is for this 
reason that in capitalism, according to Marx, man lives alienation in the 
material conditions of his life; it is an illusory understanding of the social 
nature of production, but it is an illusion with real social effects (Marx and 
Engels 1977). This view of ideology raises difficult epistemological ques-
tions which we will consider briefly below, but it also presents particular 
difficulties for feminist accounts. As work by Marxist feminists has shown, 
an explanation of how women and men have been differently positioned in 
relation to the division between the private domestic sphere and the public 
sphere of the economy and state can not rely on the, at best, gender-neutral 
Marxist theory of capitalist development since, however nuanced such a 
theory might be, by definition it can not explain sexual division (Barrett 1980; 
Nicholson 1986). A theory of how ideas are related to the political and social 
institutions of women's citizenship can not rely on a general theory of the 
relation between liberalism and capitalism such as the one put forward by 
Brennan and Pateman because such a theory can not explain why, if liber-
alism provided the ideological conditions of capitalism, women have not 
been full liberal citizens on the same terms as men. In order to do so, 
Brennan and Pateman would have to show how ideas are related to prac-
tices in ways which produced and reproduce gendered capitalist institutions 
and although it seems that they tacitly assume such a relation in the case of 
the public/private distinction, it can not be theorised from the Marxist per-
spective they propose. 
In her later work Pateman proposes a second view of the relation be-
tween political ideology and practice. The public/private distinction of lib-
eral political theory is best seen, she argues, as ideological in the critical, 
epistemological sense which is also derived from Marxism: it obscures and 
mystifies real underlying social and economic relations. However, Pateman 
is now using the term to describe the mystificatory ideas of patriarchy rather 
37 
Kate Nash 
than those of capitalism in order to capture the specificity of women's sub-
ordinate position as citizens. Firstly, she argues, having defined the home 
as private, and therefore non-political, liberalism then forgets about it and 
treats the public sphere as if it existed entirely independently; it forgets the 
interdependence of the two in a way that obscures, for example, the eco-
nomic dependence of women on male breadwinners. And secondly, the 
way in which political ideology forgets about the home allows it to consider 
that all citizens are in fact the free and equal autonomous individuals of the 
public sphere; it allows it to forget women's subordination in the home 
(Pateman 1989, p. 120-3). 
There are a number of problems with this view of ideology. Probably 
the most important in terms of feminist strategy is that it pre-supposes that 
theorists have access to the "truth" which other social actors do not possess; 
this seems to be an incipiently authoritarian stance given the inherently con-
tentious nature of most social issues. Furthermore, it would seem that if political 
theorists can take issue with ideologies, there is no reason to assume that oth-
ers accept them uncritically and that they are effective as mystifications of re-
ality. At the root of these political problems are difficult questions concerning 
the validity of drawing a sharp distinction between ideology and scientific 
knowledge. The Marxist tradition has long been grappling with such prob-
lems and it is impossible to do the debatesjustice here. However, there seems 
to be widespread agreement that they are irresolvable within the terms of the 
Marxist paradigm itself and, as Michele Barrett argues, such unresolved prob-
lems combined with other developments in social theory have contributed to 
a paradigm shift to a post-Marxist model which sees ideas and practices as 
more closely tied together in a theory of discourse (Barrett 1991, p. 46-7). 
We will explore this theory in more detail below. In relation to Pateman's 
view of ideology, however, it is worth pointing out that the "forgetting" of 
women has never been complete, it has only ever been partial and tempo-
rary. While she is certainly correct to argue that political theorists have "for-
gotten" women in the private sphere, the same is not true of social and politi-
cal movements that have attempted to institute, maintain or subvert the op-
position between public and private. 
The third view of the relation between political ideology and social and 
political practices holds that it is psychological. Political ideas are produced 
by men, and, because men are socially positioned differently from women, 
they are also psychologically different; political ideology is always generated, 
then, from a male perspective (DiStefano 1991; Benhabib 1987; Frazer et al. 
1992). This claim is not often made explicitly by feminist critics of liberalism; 
it is more frequently implied. Broadly speaking it is based on the psychoana-
38 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
lytic theory of Nancy Chodorow which links psychology to capitalism: because 
men are brought up by attentive mothers and absent fathers, in order to 
become masculine they learn to distance themselves from personal relation-
ships and so perform well in the impersonal, competitive public sphere of 
capitalism; women, on the other hand, retain their close connection with their 
mothers, which makes them ideally suited to caring for the family in the pri-
vate domestic sphere (Chodorow 1978). As a result of this cultivation of dis-
tance in their upbringing, men are oriented towards thinking morally in terms 
of hierarchical universal principles which treat all individuals and situations 
alike (Gilligan 1982). As we have seen, this is the logic of the universal prin-
ciples of liberal justice which fail to take gender differences into account where 
they are actually relevant to achieving equality between the sexes (Frazer et 
al. 1992; Benhabib 1987; Phillips 1992). On this theory, men are also given 
to rigid, dualistic thinking and especially to the denigration of whatever is as-
sociated with the feminine because of their need to maintain strict bounda-
ries between the autonomous masculine self and the dangerous feminine 
(m) other. This aspect of male psychology can be seen as responsible for the 
liberal dichotomy between public and private (DiStefano 1991; Benhabib 
1987; Pateman 1986). 
The main problem with this theory is that liberalism has not been as 
rigidly universalistic and dualistic as this view proposes. Firstly, liberalism 
has never totally excluded the feminine from the public sphere of liberal 
rights. Women actually occupy a rather ambivalent place in liberal politi-
cal ideology and practice: women are frequently included in the universal 
principles of liberal justice, sometimes in a way which goes quite far towards 
challenging their subordinate position in society precisely because it does 
give them rights as public citizens, while simultaneously they are situated, 
by the very same theorists, as inferior creatures, subordinate to men and 
without rights in the private domestic sphere. Liberal theorists have had a 
much more fluid and ambivalent conception of women than would seem 
possible on the psychological theory of political ideology. And secondly, 
liberalism itself has been much less monolithic, and much more varied than 
this approach suggests (Nash forthcoming). It is important to look at how 
women have been positioned in historically specific versions of liberalism 
and, from the point of view of the question of feminist strategies in relation 
to women's citizenship, at how liberalism has actually been modified by the 
feminist use of its ideas. It is more useful to look at liberalism as a tool with 
which to change social and political institutions, rather than supposing that 
there is a pre-given masculine (or feminine) psychology which will manifest 
itself in every social product, including political ideology. 
39 
Kate Nash 
Laclau's and Mouffe's politics of ideas 
The theories of the relation between liberal ideology and social and 
political institutions we have examined so far may be said to be foundational 
insofar as they are all realist theories of determinant structures, of society 
or of the mind (even if that mind is seen, at least to some extent, as histori-
cally specific). Such theories are over-deterministic, giving rise to accounts 
of particular social forms as necessary in relation to underlying structures. 
What they neglect is social agency, the understanding of which gives rise to 
accounts of the social which emphasise the contextually specific and continu-
ally revisable qualities of social structures. It is this emphasis on agency which 
makes Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of hegemony a better account of the 
relation between political ideology and social and political institutions than 
those theories we have so far considered. 
Laclau's and Mouffe's theory enables us to situate liberalism as a politi-
cal ideology which, although retaining a core of key terms without which it 
would no longer be situated in the liberal tradition, has been used in differ-
ent ways by different social and political movements in attempts to institute, 
maintain and disrupt social and political relations. Hegemonic articulations 
are always contingent: they are not the necessary outcome of a class or gen-
der structure which is hidden to social participants but which the theorist can 
uncover, nor are they the product of a pre-given psychological will. The suc-
cess of a hegemonic project lies in the linking together of ideological elements 
which were previously linked in other ways, or were floating free, spread across 
a variety of different contexts without being related one to the other. A 
hegemonic project attempts to articulate these floating elements in ways which 
will gain support from those who were previously hostile to the project. Fur-
thermore, hegemony is constitutive: it institutes social identities and relations 
in a way that does not depend on any a priori social rationality, nor on any 
objectively given social structure. On Laclau's and Mouffe's theory, ideas and 
social and political institutions are inseparable because all social practices are 
meaningful. According to their version of discourse theory, material objects 
and actions have no social being unless they have a significance for us which 
is necessarily linguistic, in the widest sense; for discourse theory, material social 
practices are inextricably bound up with ideas as they are articulated in rela-
tions of signification. This is not to say that all ideas have social significance, 
though none can be ruled out as insignificant a priori; but for a hegemonic 
project to be successful, the articulations it makes must be embodied in insti-
tutions which weld together a historical bloc, a hegemonic formation (Laclau 
and Mouffe 1985, p. 134-6). 
40 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
On this model, then, it can only be as a result of social action that a 
hegemonic project is successful. This is not to say that ideas are instituted 
precisely as social actors intend, nor that the use of ideas has no unintended 
consequences, but only that, since a hegemonic project involves re-working 
ideas in new, and in principle unpredictable ways, it would be impossible 
without the active intervention of social actors. However, although this is clearly 
a consequence of their theory, Laclau and Mouffe have not themselves elabo-
rated an adequate account of social agency. As a result of their commitment 
to anti-humanism they have developed a view of the subject based on Lacanian 
theory, a subject of lack and identification (Žižek 1990). But there are seri-
ous questions concerning whether this subject can do the work Laclau and 
Mouffe require of it. Laclau is clear that if there is no a priori determination 
of a hegemonic formation, and if, as he argues, the social field is increasingly 
prone to dislocations which make evident the contingency and historicity of 
existing social structures, then the question is increasingly that of who makes 
the hegemonic articulations which create new forms of the social (Laclau, 1990 
p. 59). But the theory of the subject he puts forward to explain how social 
transformations take place seems to be that of a subject entirely without agency. 
For Laclau, the subject is thrown up by the undecidability of a hegemonic 
structure and, since on his theory all identity is social, it is nothing but a sub-
ject of lack which can only construct an identity through identification with a 
partially constituted subject position in an already existing, dislocated social 
structure (p. 60). The subject is not, for Laclau, a reflexive social agent; it 
has no capacities for strategically planning and purposively re-working the 
terms of a hegemonic formation in order to realise an aim it has set itself. 
Laclau's and Mouffe's model of the subject, while usefully pointing out the 
unconscious and irrational aspects of social identity, seems inadequate to theo-
rising the more instrumental and reasoning aspects of social action: we might 
say that it over-emphasises reaction at the expense of action. This is not to say 
that the alternative is to take agency as politically and epistemologically pre-
given. As Judith Butler points out, to think of agency in this way would be to 
foreclose investigation into its construction and regulation. The point is rather 
that "subject" and "agency" may not always be identical such that the condi-
tions of possibility of reflexivity and purposiveness need to be theorised as 
well as those of lack and identification (Butler 1992). 
This paper is not concerned with a general theory of the conditions of 
possibility of agency. The point here is that, even if Laclau and Mouffe do 
not theorise agency adequately, their theory of hegemony is nevertheless 
preferable to the other theories of the relation between ideology and insti-
tutions we have looked at because it requires us to consider the action of 
41 
Kate Nash 
social agents in bringing about particular, meaningful social and political 
practices. In terms of the question with which we are concerned here, it there-
fore sensitises us to the action of feminists who can affect, and have affected, 
the institutions of women's citizenship. Once we look at feminism and wom-
en's citizenship from the perspective of the theory of hegemony we can see 
how the somewhat peculiar position women occupy as citizens in liberal po-
litical ideology and practices is to some extent a result of the efforts of femi-
nists, as well as of those working from a conventional liberal perspective. From 
the very beginning of liberalism in the seventeenth century, feminists saw the 
potential in liberalism for women's equality, while at the same time warning 
against the way in which it subordinated women to men in the non-political 
domestic sphere. And nineteenth century and early twentieth century femi-
nism used the existing terms of liberal political ideology in a counter-hegemonic 
project that influenced the development of women's citizenship as we know it 
today. First-wave feminism extended women's civil and political rights to be 
equal to men in terms of rights to own property, the right to vote and so on, 
but in terms of social rights, for which they campaigned vigorously before and 
after political rights for women were won, they pushed for a recognition of 
women as different, as primarily concerned with caring in the home. The 
terms in which women were situated as citizens who were primarily wives and 
mothers in the British post-war welfare state, for example, were to some ex-
tent the result of the influence of "new feminists" like Eleanor Rathbone. This 
is not to say that such feminists were entirely successful in their campaigns, 
but contesting and re-articulating the terms of hegemonic liberalism, along 
with the new liberalism of the times, meant that they were to some extent able 
to shape women's citizenship according to their maternalist ideals (Nash forth-
coming; Koren and Michel 1993; Bacchi 1990, ch. 3).1 
' Jane Lewis takes issue with this understanding of feminist agency, arguing that in 
Britain while women were involved in voluntary action and local politics, there is no 
evidence that they influenced the welfare state at the national level (Lewis 1994). 
However, she fails to recognise Rathbone's successful at tempt to persuade Beveridge 
to award family allowances to women (though it is true that it was not, as feminists 
hoped, introduced to reward women's unpaid care), and also the endorsement of 
the new welfare state on the part of "new feminists" like Vera Brittan (Dale and Foster 
1986, p. 3). Nor does she consider the more informal influence of women who were 
close to the political establishment, nor of those women actively involved in influencing 
policy through political parties. It was "equal rights" feminists of an older liberal 
persuasion who were critical of the way in which the welfare state positioned women 
as wives and mothers; "new feminists" - concerned especially with the conditions of 
working class women and - and women in the labour movement seem largely to have 
approved of the way in which welfare liberalism addressed women in the specificity 
of their position as women. 
42 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
A feminist "politics of ideas'"? 
Laclau's and Mouffe's theory is a theory of a politics of ideas in that it 
is concerned with the use of ideological elements in hegemonic projects 
which aim to institute new social and political institutions. It is clearly dif-
ferent from the "politics of ideas" put forward by Anne Phillips. Firstly, 
because for Phillips politics is restricted to representative democracy in the 
public sphere; she explicitly argues for a definition of politics as involving 
deliberations in the public arena in which common concerns are negoti-
ated across differences, seeing the second-wave feminist slogan "the personal 
is political" as having heralded a retreat from politics as such (Phillips 1991 
p. 115-9). In the case of the "politics of ideas", for Phillips, it is party poli-
cies and voter preferences which are represented. For the theory of he-
gemony, on the other hand, politics involves the contestation of meanings 
across the social field and the démocratisation of everyday life which are 
more commonly associated with the feminist movement since the late 1960s. 
Secondly, Laclau's and Mouffe's view of agency is quite different from that 
of Phillips. As we have seen, Laclau's and Mouffe's theory of the politics of 
ideas implies that agency is required in order to hegemonise social and 
political meanings, although they do not specify how agents are formed. 
Phillips, on the other hand, is explicitly concerned with agency, counter-
posing the "politics of ideas" in her sense with the "politics of presence" on 
the grounds that the physical presence of women in the political process could 
provide the conditions in which women will be genuinely empowered as 
political agents. 
Phillips is explicitly concerned to outline a theory of gender-differenti-
ated political rights on the grounds that they may provide the solution to 
women's secondary status as citizens. It has come to be accepted by many 
feminists that in order for women to achieve equality with men, women should 
have specific citizenship rights oswomen (Pateman 1992; Young 1990). It is 
probably not very controversial now to argue for a minimally different set 
of social rights for women where it is a matter of biological differences be-
tween the sexes, with regard to pregnancy and breast-feeding, for example. 
And the argument for a gender-differentiated citizenship has also been ex-
tended, somewhat more controversially, to civil rights in the case of wom-
en's right to self-defence on the grounds of provocation where they have been 
subjected to severe, long-term violence by their male partners. Phillips, 
alongside other feminists, including Iris Marion Young, is arguing that gen-
der-differentiated political rights are necessary because political rights for 
women as women would ensure that reasonable numbers of women were 
43 
Kate Nash 
engaged in the political process and this would be likely to result in more 
egalitarian civil and social rights for women because it would then be more 
difficult for policy-makers to marginalise issues which are of significance to 
women (Phillips 1995; Young 1990). This raises extremely complex issues 
concerning representation which will not be addressed here (Phillips 1991; 
Phillips 1995). But it also raises interesting questions concerning the role 
of ideas in the political process and the agency of women as a social group. 
Phillips' tentative hope - that if women participate in policy-making 
it will make a difference to the outcome - is based on the view that women, 
though not all women, may share a perspective which is distinctive from that 
of men on particular issues. In agreement with feminist arguments against 
essentialism, Phillips is reluctant to give too much weight to the commonality 
of women's experience or shared interests. But she does argue that women 
are more concerned about certain issues than men are, or can be - on matters 
of female reproduction, for example - whatever their actual stance on those 
issues may be. And she also holds that men's and women's interests can be 
in conflict - rights to employment for women undermine men's pre-eminence 
in the labour-market, for example - even though this is not a conflict be-
tween the interests of all women and those of all men (p. 67- 9). Phillips' 
strongest argument for the necessity of a "politics of presence" is not that 
women will be more strenuous advocates on women's issues than men, though 
she does make this point, but rather that when policy is being made in new 
areas when women's concerns have not yet been formulated, and so are not 
even on the agenda for discussion, it is only if there are women actually 
present in the policy-making process that those concerns stand any chance 
of being voiced at all (p. 43-5). It is for this reason, she argues, that the 
"politics of ideas", the conventional view of representative democracy in 
which what is of concern is what constituents think and believe, is inadequate. 
If women's concerns have not yet been formulated, they can not be repre-
sented in this way. Although she is clear that there is no guarantee that 
women's presence in policy-making will result in more egalitarian policies, 
and although she is against assuming that women share a group identity, 
Phillips' conclusions are based, then, on the possibility that most women do 
have a distinct perspective and that most men do not see certain things in 
the same way (p. 158). 
As we have seen, Phillips convincingly counterposes her "politics of 
presence" to the conventional "politics of ideas". However, f rom the point 
of view of the "politics of ideas" of the theory of hegemony, Phillips' account 
needs to be supplemented with an understanding of how perspectives are 
44 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
socially constructed; in particular, of how "a woman's perspective" could 
become meaningful to women ai women in the policy-making process. 
Phillips makes the interesting point that in the case of class interests, 
representation has not seemed to require a "politics of presence" because 
class interests have been seen as "objective", as definable and definitive 
beyond the experience of a particular group and therefore as represent-
able by advocates who do not themselves directly share those interests (p. 
174-5). In the case of women, however, according to Phillips, interests are 
not seen as so clear cut and this is why she prefers the term "perspective"; in 
the case of women it is more a matter of issues yet to be defined on the basis 
of experiences and perceptions of oppression (p. 176). One of the interest-
ing things about the way Phillips makes this distinction is that she actually 
sees the distinction itself as a matter of a difference in perspectives: class in-
terests have been seen as objective where women's interests are not. This is 
interesting because, in bracketing the "truth" or otherwise of this percep-
tion, Phillips comes very close to adopting the discourse theory view that 
everything is a matter of perspective. 
The idea of perspective is linked, for discourse theorists, to the impor-
tance of language, because it is in language that experience is organised and 
given meaning, that anything can be perceived or "known". For discourse 
theorists, then, while individual women participating in the policy-making 
process might have certain inchoate experiences and perceptions which have 
no current political validity, to articulate these as "a woman's perspective" 
must involve constructing it as such in language. How women's interests are 
understood, whether or not all women are taken to have a distinct set of 
interests, whether some women are held to have a very different set of inter-
ests from another group of women and so on, depends largely on the per-
suasiveness of the arguments made for one view or another. Phillips acknowl-
edges as much when she notes that the position Norwegian women MPs take 
on issues of child-care is determined by party rather than gender: the right 
favours policies to raise the value of work women do in the home, while the 
left advocates enhancing public child-care provision to increase women's 
participation in the labour market (Phillips 1995 p. 76). While women may 
come to see themselves as having certain interests in common, how those 
interests are interpreted will depend on how they are constructed in rela-
tion to already existing discursive possibilities. 
Furthermore, the view that experience is always constructed in language 
is also linked to the Derridean idea that because of the way in which lan-
guage works, there is no possibility of any kind of "presence". Derrida's 
theory of language has been worked through in relation to feminist theory 
45 
Kate Nash 
and the issue of women's presence by Judi th Butler. Butler's theory of 
performativity as the re-iteration of the identity of women which both regu-
lates and constrains its production, and at the same time destabilizes it, is in 
part derived from Derrida's deconstruction of Austen's Hoiu To Do Things 
With Words. In Ltd Inc, he shows how performatives depend on "iterability": 
the performative capacity of the "serious speech act", "I name this ship...", 
for example, depends not jus t on the context and intention of the speaker, 
but also on the repetition (which is at the same time, necessarily, the altera-
tion), of the words used in disparate "non-serious speech acts". What this 
means is that words are never fully present, they can not be captured in the 
intentions of the speaker, and their meaning can never be made singular 
and self-evident (Butler 1993; Derrida 1988). If we take Derrida's theory 
seriously, the construction of women as the possessors of a set of interests 
which could then be represented in the political process is impossible in 
that such a construction would always depend on other constructions, re-
peated in other contexts, for other purposes, which could not, by definition, 
be identical. There would always, necessarily, be a plurality of women's 
identities and sets of interests precisely because women can never be fully 
present in one place. 
If "women" never "is", in that it is never a fully constituted, single iden-
tity, this again indicates that the outcome of Phillips' "politics of presence" 
is dependent on the "politics of ideas" elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe. 
Although the re-iterated identity of women can never be finally fixed, femi-
nist politics involves the contestation and re-definition of what it means to 
be a woman and what it might mean in the future. While this requires the 
disruption of hegemonic definitions, the aspect of feminist politics advocated 
by Judith Butler, it may on occasion also require the attempt to establish a 
new hegemony which makes it possible for women to participate in social 
and political life on a more equal basis with men. A more egalitarian social 
formation may require the attempt to constitute a feminist identity for 
women, by fixing a particular version of what it is to be a woman in legisla-
tion concerning the right to self-defence against domestic violence, for ex-
ample, in the institutionalisation of citizenship rights, and perhaps in the 
case of affirmative action in the economy and state (Nash 1994). To this 
end, Phillips' "politics of presence" may be one aspect of feminist hegemonic 
projects which contest the social and cultural meanings of women's lives in 
the face of traditional and authoritarian conceptions of family life and wom-
en's role, and which promote more inclusive definitions of women in order 
to establish more egalitarian citizenship rights. Insofar as it contributes to 
such a project, however, it will not be the presence of women in the politi-
46 
A "Politics of Ideas " and Women's Citizenship 
cal process which is effective, but rather the contestation and transforma-
tion of women's position that is achieved in arguing for women's equality, 
both within the formal political process and outside it. 
Conclusion 
In this paper I have argued that feminism should be seen as a "politics 
of ideas". Ideas should not be seen simply as the epiphenomena of socio-
economic or psychic structures; they have an efficacy in their own right in-
sofar as they are constitutive of social and political practices. In order to 
achieve this efficacy they require the elaboration and commitment of social 
actors who institute them in social practices. Once we see ideas in this light, 
it is evident that the formal political process is not the only forum from which 
political change may be realized; indeed the efficacy of ideas in "official" 
politics may very well depend on the politics of ideas conducted in civil so-
ciety, the bureaucratic institutions of the state, and even the confines of the 
"private" domestic sphere, at least as much as in the arenas of representa-
tive democracy. It follows then that political agency can not be considered 
in terms of the experience of a particular group of physically present, em-
bodied persons in these arenas, as Phillips' argument concerning women 
as the agents of feminist political transformation suggests. It is rather that 
since social change depends on the contestation and transformation of ideas 
embedded in social practices carried out by less formally empowered agents, 
we need to consider how such agency is constructed in other social sites and 
the conditions which make it effective in some cases but not others. It is not 
that increasing the presence of women in the formal political process will 
have no effect; its effect or otherwise is an empirical matter, not one on which 
an a priori] udge m e n t can be made. On the argument presented here, how-
ever, insofar as it is successful, the "politics of presence" will not be effective 
because it enables the representation of women's unformulated experience 
in the formal political process. It will only be successful if increasing the 
numbers of women in the political institutions of representative democracy 
is interpreted as indicating the will and the opportunity to realize a more 
egalitarian form of citizenship, and such interpretations are a matter of a 
"politics of ideas". 
47 
Kate Nash 
Acknowledgements 
I would like to thank Ann-Marie Fortier, David Howarth, Jelica Sumic-
Riha and Simon Thompson for helpful comments on this paper. 
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