The Seneca Falls Convention is typically seen as the beginning of the first women's rights movement in the United States.Revolutionary Backlashargues otherwise. According to Rosemarie Zagarri, the ...debate over women's rights began not in the decades prior to 1848 but during the American Revolution itself. Integrating the approaches of women's historians and political historians, this book explores changes in women's status that occurred from the time of the American Revolution until the election of Andrew Jackson. Although the period after the Revolution produced no collective movement for women's rights, women built on precedents established during the Revolution and gained an informal foothold in party politics and male electoral activities. Federalists and Jeffersonians vied for women's allegiance and sought their support in times of national crisis. Women, in turn, attended rallies, organized political activities, and voiced their opinions on the issues of the day. After the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft'sA Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a widespread debate about the nature of women's rights ensued. The state of New Jersey attempted a bold experiment: for a brief time, women there voted on the same terms as men. Yet as Rosemarie Zagarri argues inRevolutionary Backlash, this opening for women soon closed. By 1828, women's politicization was seen more as a liability than as a strength, contributing to a divisive political climate that repeatedly brought the country to the brink of civil war. The increasing sophistication of party organizations and triumph of universal suffrage for white males marginalized those who could not vote, especially women. Yet all was not lost. Women had already begun to participate in charitable movements, benevolent societies, and social reform organizations. Through these organizations, women found another way to practice politics.
While the typical Japanese male politician glides through his district in air-conditioned taxis, the typical female voter trundles along the side streets on a simple bicycle. In this first ...ethnographic study of the politics of the average female citizen in Japan, Robin LeBlanc argues that this taxi-bicycle contrast reaches deeply into Japanese society.
To study the relationship between gender and liberal democratic citizenship, LeBlanc conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in suburban Tokyo among housewives, volunteer groups, consumer cooperative movements, and the members of a committee to reelect a female Diet member who used her own housewife status as the key to victory. LeBlanc argues that contrary to popular perception, Japanese housewives are ultimately not without a political world.
Full of new and stimulating material, engagingly written, and deft in its weaving of theoretical perspectives with field research, this study will not only open up new dialogues between gender theory and broader social science concerns but also provide a superb introduction to politics in Japan as a whole.
In recent years, parties and legislatures in more than 100 countries have adopted quotas for the selection of female candidates to political office. This book addresses quotas as a global phenomenon ...and develops a framework for explaining their adoption and mixed effects on the numbers of women elected.
We leverage the institutional framework in Switzerland to discern the revealed preferences of female and male voters for various legislative proposals. We examine whether female or male legislators’ ...votes in parliament are more congruent with women’s or men’s revealed preferences for identical legislative proposals. Our analysis of 47,527 matches between legislators and their voters reveals no significant difference in how closely female and male legislators match the preferences of women and men, particularly, when accounting for party affiliations. We conclude that female legislators do not demonstrate higher congruence with women’s preferences than their male counterparts in parliament.
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•We measure revealed policy preferences of female and male voters.•We measure congruence between female and male legislators’ decisions with female and male voters’ preferences.•Gendered differences in congruence are minor.•Gendered differences in congruence are quantitatively void if legislators’ party affiliations are accounted for.
This book presents 12 case studies on female legislative representation in new post-communist democracies in Europe. The cases represent a wide range of “pathways” from communist rule. Five rank as ...lower-middle income (Bulgaria, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine), four as upper-middle income (Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, and two as high-income (Germany and Slovenia). A general framework on legislative recruitment based on Western political science literature is used to explain changes over time within each country. It is shown that many of the theoretical predictions based on existing literature from industrialized democracies hold true in Eastern Europe. The book ends with a discussion on the next steps to take in understanding women’s access to political power in post-communist Europe.
This ground-breaking book surveys the history of women's political thought in Europe from the late medieval period to the early modern era. The authors examine women's ideas about topics such as the ...basis of political authority, the best form of political organisation, justifications of obedience and resistance, and concepts of liberty, toleration, sociability, equality, and self-preservation. Women's ideas concerning relations between the sexes are discussed in tandem with their broader political outlooks; and the authors demonstrate that the development of a distinctively sexual politics is reflected in women's critiques of marriage, the double standard, and women's exclusion from government. Women writers are also shown to be indebted to the ancient idea of political virtue, and to be acutely aware of being part of a long tradition of female political commentary. This work will be of tremendous interest to political philosophers, historians of ideas, and feminist scholars alike.
In Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments, Miki Caul Kittilson examines women’s presence in party politics and national legislatures, and the conditions under which their entrance occurs. She ...theorizes that parties are more likely to incorporate women when their strategy takes into account the institutional and political “opportunity structures” of both the party and party system. Kittilson studies how women pressed for greater representation, and how democratic party systems responded to their demands. Research on women’s representation has largely focused at the national level. Yet these studies miss the substantial variations between parties within and across European democracies. This book provides systematic cross-national and case study evidence to show that political parties are the key mechanism for increasing women’s parliamentary representation. Kittilson uncovers party-level mechanisms that explain the growth in women’s parliamentary participation since the 1970s in ten European democracies. The inclusion of new challengers in party politics is often attributed to mounting pressures from activists and public opinion at large. This book contradicts the conventional wisdom by demonstrating that women’s gains within parties flow not only from pressure from party supporters, but also from calculated efforts made by the central party leadership in a top-down fashion under specific circumstances. Certainly women’s efforts are essential, and they can be most effective when they are framed, timed, and targeted toward the most opportune structures within the party hierarchy. Kittilson concludes that specific party institutions encourage women’s ascendance to the top ranks of power within a political party.
How have women in many Muslim-majority countries been able to achieve surprising success despite the significant constraints imposed by conservative gender ideology and authoritarian political ...parties and systems? Through a comparative focus on Iran and Turkey, Mona Tajali examines the activities and strategies of women’s rights groups across the ideological spectrum. She explores how various groups have negotiated with political elites in order to bolster female political representation and identifies the conditions that stimulate greater support to ease women’s path to political office. Studying how women’s groups manoeuvre within these structures is important to help our understanding of the gendered politics of autocratic regimes.
