Kant justifies his distinction between active and passive citizens on the grounds that passive citizens “must be able to work their way up” to full participatory citizenship. Exclusions from suffrage must open and fluid if they are to be rightful forms of political inequality. This paper challenges the rightfulness of these inequalities by exploring the parallel position of women and domestic servants in Kant’s account of the state. A number of Kantian scholars have asked whether women are included in the class of those who might “work their way up” to active citizenship. I argue that Kant’s exclusion of women from the class of active citizens need not be explicitly supported by an account of the biological inferiority of women: rather, women are mere passive citizens because of their position within the household, which Kant describes as “a society of unequals.”
By exploring the exclusion of wives and domestic workers, I draw attention to the ways in which citizenship rights are tied to one’s position in the institutional structures of Private Right and to a troubling valuation of labor practices. By considering the relationship between the “independence” of the head of household and labor practices within the household, I argue that the domestic sphere is structured in such a way that Kant must systematically deny wives and domestic laborers the right to “work their way up.”
By attaching rightful inequalities to one’s position in an institutional structure, Kant transforms the “natural” inferiority of women into the rightful inequality of wives. The structure of the domestic realm disqualifies wives (and domestic laborers) from active citizenship; no biological claim about the inferiority of women is necessary to justify this exclusion. Finally, I ask how this transformation of “natural” inferiority into “rightful” inequality is reproduced in Kant's cosmopolitan arguments.
