11 - The Unhappy Marriage of Gender and Socio-economic Rights in France

Summary

Gender has always shaped rights in particularly visible ways, from the supposedly abstract, universal and gender-neutral civil and political rights articulated in the French Revolution of 1789, to the twenty-first century, where rights are claimed on the basis of membership in specific groups. Throughout this long period of over two-and-a-quarter centuries, sexual difference has complicated concepts of rights and how they have been recognised and put into practice. This chapter explores these complexities and questions the very category of ‘socio-economic’ rights.  Examining the place of sexual difference in conceptualising rights and duties demonstrates that whereas employers and the state acknowledged economic rights and social rights for men, economic rights did not automatically accompany social rights for women. Indeed, these two sets of rights were often at odds, as women’s problematic economic citizenship in France illustrates.