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Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship , New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. Pp. xxiv + 405. Price $25.00 (ISBN 0–8090–7383–8).

Linda Kerber has written a carefully reasoned and highly intelligent book that aims to shift the standard debate on citizenship. Rather than focus on the expansion of rights over time, she turns our attention to the more sober but equally crucial subject of civic obligation. The choice makes sense given that her study is deeply concerned with women's problematic relationship to the state. From the perspective of feminists, the political history of women in America is anything but triumphant: white women were denied the vote until 1920, and states continued to find ways to exclude poor and noncaucasian women long after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment; women were long excluded from military service and are still subject to combat restrictions; women were not included injury service on a equal basis until 1975, and exemptions based on sex were not challenged as violations of equal protection until the late 1980s. Women have been burdened with numerous civil disabilities derived from marital status and normative rules upholding sexual difference, and they are not considered constitutional equals with men as demonstrated by the 1982 defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and its failed revival more recently. Kerber's argument unmasks the liberal conceit that progress was—and is—inevitable.