Suspect citizenship is what happens when the rights of full membership in a political community are never secure and always contingent upon the satisfaction of supposed moral duties and responsibilities, when duties and responsibilities are not shared equally by all but assigned to some groups and excused for others, and when even adherence to moral strictures will not guarantee participatory power in politics. Despite the egalitarian promise of our democracy and the unending struggles to fulfill this promise for all, what Jocelyn Boryczka calls the “American political script” casts women in the impossible role of suspect citizens. This book aims to explicate “women’s tenuous membership in the political community that derives from the paradox of their moral responsibility for either democracy’s success or its failure despite their lack of formal political power relative to male citizens” (p. 5).
As Boryczka presents it, political life is teeming with moral expectations and moralistic judgments, with women hit especially hard by the backlash against feminism that took hold in the 1980s. What pundits and political opponents have called the conservative “war on women” is the continuation of a much older project, built into the foundations of American democracy. Suspect Citizens brings early episodes in political moralism into contact with more recent and familiar iterations of backlash politics and shows how women are subjected to a binary logic of virtue and vice.
Boryczka’s conceptual history maps the shifting border between virtue and vice in American culture, from debates over sex education to conflicts over the meaning of women’s work outside the home. Virtue and vice, for the author, are the crucial moral concepts at work in women’s political oppression. This binary keeps women under constant scrutiny, rewarded for moral excellence and, more often, castigated for presumed moral failings. For this reason, she is critical of all efforts to bring the language of virtue—in Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and Mary Daly’s feminist theology, in William Galston’s conservative liberalism and in Sara Ruddick’s maternalist feminism—into politics. Drawing from Judith Shklar’s work on “ordinary vices” and the example offered by female factory workers, lesbian sadomasochists, and all who refuse the dictates of feminine virtue, Boryczka outlines a democratic ethic that presses beyond the borders of our gendered moralism.
Suspect Citizens provides an original and important contribution to contemporary political theory, especially democratic theory and feminist ethics. The author moves with ease and erudition through the history of Western political thought and American political discourse, advancing a narrative that is complex and full of unfamiliar characters and unexpected affinities. Readers are introduced to Puritan ministers and eighteenth-century education reformers, privy to conflicts over textile work and radical lesbian fantasy, and reacquainted with figures like Alexis de Toqueville and Mary Wollstonescraft, here interpreted through the conceptual frame of virtue and vice. And the relationship between political inequality and our moral imaginary is thrown into critical relief.
Some of Boryczka’s analytic moves are hurried: Contemporary Catholicism is presented as the moral heir to seventeeth-century Puritanism, without much attention to irony that a deeply antipapalist religious movement is the ideological forerunner to Catholic conservatism. Indeed, ideology itself remains an underdeveloped concept in this book. For instance, in the author’s treatment of “Ozzie and Harriet morality” in the book’s fifth chapter, it is unclear whether she believes this image of domestic life to be historically real but obsolete or a figment of a reactionary political imagination. Do Ozzie and Harriet represent real relations, imaginary relations, or, as an Althusserian perspective would suggest, a representation of our imaginary relation to real material conditions? Other analytic moves, some quite powerful, need a more careful defense to be truly convincing. For example, in a deft reading of Tocqueville and the problem of democratic despotism, Boryczka argues that participation in political affairs is seen by early Americans as a distraction and a vice, jeopardizing men’s role in the economy and women’s responsibility for the family. Political inactivity, by extension, becomes a moral virtue. This is a provocative claim and helps make some sense of the apathy and indifference too familiar in American political life, but it seems to rely on unjustified leaps of argument.
Suspect Citizens raises some more general questions: Is vice always the opposite of virtue? Is virtue always a moral bludgeon? Must a feminist critique of virtue entail rejection of the idea of virtue? If “ordinary vices play a necessary civic role in liberal democracy by accounting for the complex realities of political life,” what about extraordinary vices, more troublesome than hypocrisy or snobbery (p. 137)? If some vices can be called civic or democratic, can others be called antidemocratic, and ought we worry about them? Why does the discourse of virtue and vice, especially as it pertains to women, so often turn on sex and sexuality? And is this—public anxiety about sex and sexuality—what is really at stake in backlash politics and the appeal to virtue? Does the idea of backlash do full justice to the complexity of American politics and history? Are we still in a period of backlash? Indeed, must we think about political time as a “pendulum,” swinging back and forth, or are there other ways to capture the temporalities of democracy (p. 67)?
More specific problems with the book are those implicitly raised but unaddressed by its author. Although Boryczka mentions race and class as contours of gendered virtue and vice, neither figures centrally in her case studies or her analysis. For example, in her discussion of feminist care ethics and women’s work outside and inside the home, there is no mention of the underpaid care work that permits some women to pursue their professional careers after having children (p. 140). There is no mention of the racialization of vice, especially sexual licentiousness and domestic dysfunction. And even in the one case study that seems so centrally about class conflict—the Lowell Mill Girls—the question of class curiously falls out of view. Boryczka gestures toward the material foundations of our moralism, but leaves this unexamined. For example, the presentation of Puritan witch-hunting suggests the significance of property and property-claim disputes in motivating the trials. The cases of Mistress Ann Hibbens, who sued male carpenters for unsatisfactory work done in her home, and Katherine Harrison, whose husband’s death made her one of the wealthiest people in Connecticut, both accused of witchcraft, beg for some materialist analysis (pp. 55–65). Here, and elsewhere, a purely conceptual history is unsatisfying.
Finally, it is striking that there is no discussion of contemporary battles over citizenship. For instance, the Dream Act, a legislative initiative to provide conditional permanent residency to certain immigrants—conditional upon, among other qualifications, “good moral character”—might be worth considering in connection with Boryczka’s case studies. Here, a seemingly progressive piece of public policy carries weighty moral expectations and judgments and could be said to participate in the xenophobia it purports to challenge. Much as the feminist appeals to virtue unwittingly partake of a moral discourse used against women, the legislative campaign to grant formal legal status to “dreamers” holds certain individuals and groups to a different moral standard of political membership. Suspect citizenship, in this case, seems almost an understatement.
