Gendered Time in Law: Towards a New Concept of the Caring Citizen

Abstract

Gender and time have been discussed at length from a sociological point of view. Social scientists have pointed out new temporal conditions. Feminist research has indicated the extent to which essentialist paradigms behind notions of time are gendered. Less attention has been paid, however, to the way gender and time are embedded in jurisprudence. For legal theorists, the unequal participation of women in both paid and unpaid work is one of the reasons why women still lack full citizenship. A redistribution of clock-time from the public sphere to the time spent on unpaid work in the private sphere has been put forward by policy-makers as the preferred solution to this problem. In this article I argue that this legal approach to time leaves gendered relationships untouched as it neglects the interrelationship between different kinds of social time.