The freedom and power of citizens was buttressed by the exclusionary effects on non-citizens. My reading of Apollodoros’ Against Neaira ([Dem.] 59) in Chapter 5 exemplifies the practical results of the ideology of freedom on all levels of Athenian society. The case calls into question the limits of citizenship and demonstrates how a status transgression can impair the jury’s own power. The prosecution speech alleges that Neaira, a resident foreigner, is guilty of pretending to be a citizen. As a foreign, female sex laborer, Neaira represents the antithesis of the model citizen. Neaira’s arrogation of citizenship privileges, however, gives her a measure of positive freedom and power. In contrast to other readings, I show that power struggles are crucial to analyzing the prosecution’s arguments. The prosecution attempts to show that instead of doing “whatever she wishes,” Neaira deserves to be subject to others doing “whatever they wish” to her. Apollodoros’ characterization of her transgressions as destabilizing citizenship indicates the centrality of autonomy and power to citizen identity. Hence, the importance of positive freedom was not simply theoretical, but practical.

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.