Framework is key to this debate – advocating a basic income by incorporating a feminist perspective is critical to changing patriarchal norms and avoiding the negative solvency turns.

Thus feminists might be expected strongly to support the introduction of a basic income.34 Yet this is not the case. Some feminists are critical of the idea because they fear a basic income would reinforce the existing sexual division of labor and women’s lesser citizenship. They argue that the provision of an income without having to engage in paid employment would, in light of women’s position in the labor market combined with lingering beliefs about the proper place and tasks of women and men, give women an even greater incentive to undertake more unpaid caring work in the household, and, conversely, men would have another incentive to freeride. A basic income, that is, would reinforce existing limitations on women’s freedom.35 This objection illustrates the importance of the reasons advanced for supporting a basic income. The probability of feminist fears being borne out is higher, for example, when the argument is made that to avoid weakening the “incentive to work” a basic income should be below subsistence level. This “incentive” is promoted with men and paid employment in mind. A basic income at this level provides no incentive for wives to “work” (i.e., enter paid employment); rather, it would encourage them to do more unpaid caring work. Again, to support basic income on the grounds that it would improve the living standards of the poorest sectors of the population does not promote consideration of the structural connections between marriage, employment, and citizenship, and the private and public sexual division of labor. Without the debates about basic income being informed by feminist arguments, and a concern for democratization (and genuine democratization necessarily includes women’s freedom and standing as citizens), the discussion will revolve around ways of tinkering with the existing system rather than encouraging thinking about how it might be made more democratic. Putting democratization at the center requires attention to institutional structures, especially the institutions of marriage and employment. For instance, Ackerman and Alstott remark in The Stakeholder Society that the “case for stakeholding does not ultimately rest on its effects on employment, marriage, or crime. It rests on each American’s claim to respect as a free and equal citizen.”36 However (leaving crime aside), the respect accorded to women and men as free and equal citizens has a great deal to do with the institutions of marriage and employment. It is not possible to understand women’s lesser citizenship, as Ackerman and Alstott show in their discussion of social security, without understanding the relationship between their position as wives and men’s position as workers.