No constitutional right to be ladies

Struggles over women's suffrage and the ERA have publicized how much women have related their struggle for equality to rights. That the history of citizens' obligations is also linked to gender has been less understood. In this landmark book, the historian Linda K. Kerber opens up this important and neglected subject for the first time. She begins during the Revolution, when married women did not have the same obligation as their husbands to be "patriots," and ends in the present, when men and women still have different obligations to serve in the armed forces. She also sets her historical imagination to work on the vastly different issues of men's and women's obligations to refrain from vagrancy, to pay taxes, and to serve on juries. By turning upside down the traditional paradigm of women's history as one of rights, Kerber shows us that there is no "right" to be excused from the obligations of citizenship. Hers is an invaluable new way of understanding the history of women in America - and American history more generally.