The first step toward their emancipation was granting them suffrage. They then became citizens. Universal suffrage makes citizens of all who are above the age of consent and participate in their own government. That gives us the definition of citizenship. It belongs to those who are given political liberty and equality, those who are governed with their own consent and have a voice in their own government.
All citizens are politically free.
They are not all politically equal, however, for in constitutional governments citizens maybe temporarily or permanently in public office. When that is the case, they have more political power than those who are not in public office, because they have more political functions to discharge. Another way of defining citizenship is to speak of citizens as having a share in sovereignty. As citizens, all have an equal share. The existence of citizenship depends upon the existence of constitutional government, but that government need not be democratic, as the government of Athens was not democratic in the fifth century B.C., and the government of the United States was not democratic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.