CWRU Faculty Authors

What do we know about women, politics, and democracy in the United States? The last thirty years have witnessed a remarkable increase in women's participation in American politics and an explosion of research on female political actors, and the transformations effected by them, during the same period. Political Women and American Democracy provides a critical synthesis of scholarly research by leading experts in the field. The collected essays examine women as citizens, voters, participants, movement activists, partisans, candidates, and legislators. The authors provide frameworks for understanding and organizing existing scholarship; focus on theoretical, methodological, and empirical debates; and map out productive directions for future research. Political Women and American Democracy is an invaluable resource for scholars and students studying and conducting women and politics research.

This book examines the relationship between women's movements and states in West Europe and North America, as states have relocated their formal powers and policy-making responsibilities. Since the 1980s, North American and West European states have reduced the scope and volume of their national responsibilities, increasingly employing neoliberal free market rhetoric, and developed transnational economic and political authorities. Simultaneously, second wave women's movements have been transformed. Movements that were revolutionary in rhetoric, autonomous from states, and largely informally organized in the 1970s are, by the 1990s, employing moderate neoliberal rhetoric, entering state institutions as active participants, and creating more formal organizations. Utilizing a common theoretical framework, the contributors examine how movements have influenced the reconfiguration of nation-states and how these changes have influenced the goals, mobilization, tactics, success and rhetoric of women's movements in various Western European and North American countries.