Download or read book Political Women and American Democracy written by Christina Wolbrecht and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-24 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. As the only book to offer "state of the field" essays on women and gender in U.S. politics, Political Women and American Democracy will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students studying and conducting women and politics research.

Download or read book Women and Democracy written by Jane S. Jaquette and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1998-10-07 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique look at the political experiences of women in two regions of the world--Latin American and Eastern and Central Europe--which have moved from authoritarian to democratic regimes. By examining various political attitudes and efforts of women as they learn to participate in the political process, contributors offer important new insights into democratic consolidation.

Download or read book Seeing Women Strengthening Democracy written by Magda Hinojosa and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-17 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under what conditions do citizens most effectively connect to the democratic process? We tend to think that factors like education, income, and workforce participation are most important, but research has shown that they exert less influence than expected when it comes to women's attitudes and engagement. Scholars have begun to look more closely at how political context affects engagement. This book asks how contexts promote women's interest and connection to democracy, and it looks to Latin America for answers. The region provides a good test case as the institution of gender quotas has led to more recent and dramatic increases in women's political representation. Specifically, Magda Hinojosa and Miki Caul Kittilson argue that the election of women to political office--particularly where women's presence is highly visible to the public--strengthens the connections between women and the democratic process. For women, seeing more "people like me" in politics changes attitudes and orientations toward government and politics. The authors untangle the effects of gender quotas and the subsequent rise in women's share of elected positions, finding that the latter exerts greater impact on women's connections to the democratic process. Women citizens are more knowledgeable, interested, and efficacious when they see women holding elected office. They also express more trust in government and in political institutions and greater satisfaction with democracy when they see more women in politics. The authors look at comparative data from across Latin America, but focus on an in-depth case study of Uruguay. Here, the authors find that gender gaps in political engagement declined significantly after a doubling of women's representation in the Senate. The authors therefore argue that far-reaching gender gaps can be overcome by more equitable representation in our political institutions.

Download or read book Women Politics and Democracy in Latin America written by Tomáš Došek and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses the current tendencies in women’s representation and their role in politics in Latin American countries from three different perspectives. Firstly, the authors examine cultural, political-partisan and organizational obstacles that women face in and outside institutions. Secondly, the book explores barriers in political reality, such as gender legislation implementation, public administration and international cooperation, and proposes solutions, supported by successful experiences, emphasising the nonlinearity of the implementation process. Thirdly, the authors highlight the role of women in politics at the subnational level. The book combines academic expertise in various disciplines with contributions from practitioners within national and international institutions to broaden the reader’s understanding of women in Latin American politics.

Download or read book The Lost Wave written by Molly Tambor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-09 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Italy emerged from World War II, the first women entered the national government. The 45 women who became parliamentarians when Italian women were first entitled to vote in 1946 represented a "lost wave" of feminist action, argues Molly Tambor. In this work, Tambor reconstructs the role that these female politicians played in Italy's new democratic Republic. They proved critical in ensuring that the new Constitution formally guaranteed the equality of all citizens regardless of sex, translating the general constitutional guarantees into direct legislative rights and protections. They used a specific electoral and legislative strategy, "constitutional rights feminism," to construct an image of the female citizen as a bulwark of democracy. Mining existing tropes of femininity such as the Resistance heroine, the working mother, the sacrificial Catholic, and the "mamma Italiana," they searched for social consensus for women's equality that could reach across religious, ideological, and gender divides. The political biographies of woman politicians are intertwined with the history of the laws they created and helped pass, including paid maternity leave, the closing of state-run brothels, and women's right to become judges. Women politicians navigated gendered political identity as they picked and chose among competing models of femininity in Cold War Italy. In so doing, The Lost Wave shows, they forged a political legacy that affected the rights and opportunities of all Italian citizens.

Download or read book Engendering Democracy in Africa written by Niamh Gaynor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates women’s political participation in Africa. Going beyond the formal institutions of electoral politics, it explores a range of spaces where everyday politics take place, at national and at local levels. In recent years there have been significant improvements in the number of women elected to parliament in Africa. However, there is little indication that this is translating into better developmental outcomes, and indeed there is mounting evidence that it could in fact help to bolster some authoritarian regimes. Starting from the premise that politics is a far broader project than securing a seat in national or local legislatures alone, this book explores the opportunities for women’s political participation across a number of informal spaces where women and men gather, organise and interact in a more regular and systematic manner. Combining insights from political science, sociology and feminist theory and drawing on detailed cases from the Congo, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria and Rwanda, it examines how power in its multiple dimensions circulates across a range of everyday political spaces, while drawing attention to the links between domestic gender inequalities and the global political economy. Inviting scholars, practitioners and activists to broaden their focus beyond formal electoral institutions if they want to support women to become more politically active, this book provides fresh insights into major issues at the heart of African studies, development studies, gender and development, democratisation, and international relations.

Download or read book Resistance written by Jennifer Rubin and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of Shattered and Game Change, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin provides an insider’s look at how women across the political spectrum carried a revolution to the ballot box and defeated Donald Trump, based on interviews with key figures such as Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Stacey Abrams, Nancy Pelosi, and many more. In a compelling narrative, bookended by Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and his 2020 defeat, Rubin delivers an absorbing analysis of the women’s counter-Trump revolution. Resistance tracks a set of dynamic women voters, activists and politicians who rose up when Donald Trump took the White House and fundamentally changed the political landscape. From the first Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration to the Blue Wave in the 2018 midterms to the flood of female presidential candidates in 2020 to the inauguration of Kamala Harris, women from across the ideological spectrum entered the political arena and became energized in a way America had not witnessed in decades. They marched, they organized, they donated vast sums of cash, they ran for office, they made new alliances. And they defeated Donald Trump. Democratic women candidates learned that they could win in large numbers, even in red districts. Black women voters in 2020 surged in Georgia and in suburbs in key swing states. Women across the country voted in greater numbers than in any previous election, flipped the Senate, and ensured victory for the first female Vice President in the nation’s history. While Democrats recorded impressive victories, Republican women delivered critical victories of their own. From the White House to Congress, from activists to protestors, from liberals to conservatives, Resistance delivers the first comprehensive portrait of women’s historic political surge provoked by the horror of President Trump. This is the indelible story of how American women transformed their own lives, vanquished Trump, secured unprecedented positions of power and redefined US politics decades to come. Resistance is essential reading for understanding the most important election in American history and the role women played in redesigning modern politics.

Download or read book Democracy and the Rise of Women s Movements in Sub Saharan Africa written by Kathleen M. Fallon and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2008-08-08 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite a late and fitful start, democracy in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe has recently shown promising growth. Kathleen M. Fallon discusses the role of women and women's advocacy groups in furthering the democratic transformation of formerly autocratic states. Using Ghana as a case study, Fallon examines the specific processes women are using to bring about political change. She assesses information gathered from interviews and surveys conducted in Ghana and assays the existing literature to provide a focused look at how women have become involved in the democratization of sub-Saharan nations. The narrative traces the history of democratic institutions in the region—from the imposition of male-dominated mechanisms by western states to latter-day reforms that reflect the active resurgence of women’s political power within many African cultures—to show how women have made significant recent political gains in Ghana and other emerging democracies. Fallon attributes these advances to a combination of forces, including the decline of the authoritarian state and its attendant state-run women's organizations, newly formed constitutions, and newfound access to good-governance funding. She draws the study into the larger debate over gendered networks and democratic reform by exploring how gender roles affect and are affected by the state in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In demonstrating how women’s activism is evolving with and shaping democratization across the region, Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa reveals how women’s social movements are challenging the barriers created by colonization and dictatorships in Africa and beyond.

Download or read book Gender and the Politics of Rights and Democracy in Latin America written by Maxine Molyneux and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-28 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume assesses one of the most important developments in contemporary Latin American women's movements: the engagement with rights-based discourses. Organised women have played a central role in the continued struggle for democracy in the region and with it gender justice. The foregrounding of human rights, and within them the recognition of women's rights, has offered women a strategic advantage in pursuing their goals of an inclusive citizenship. The country-based chapters analyse specific bodies of rights: rights and representation, domestic violence, labour rights, reproductive rights, legal advocacy, socio-economic rights, rights and ethnicity, and rights, the state and autonomy.

Download or read book The Motherless State written by Eileen McDonagh and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American women attain more professional success than most of their counterparts around the world, but they lag surprisingly far behind in the national political arena. Women held only 15 percent of U.S. congressional seats in 2006, a proportion that ranks America behind eighty-two other countries in terms of females elected to legislative office. A compelling exploration of this deficiency, TheMotherless State reveals why the United States differs from comparable democracies that routinely elect far more women to their national governing bodies and chief executive positions. Explaining that equal rights alone do not ensure equal access to political office, Eileen McDonagh shows that electoral gender parity also requires public policies that represent maternal traits. Most other democracies, she demonstrates, view women as more suited to govern because their governments have taken on maternal roles through social welfare provisions, gender quotas, or the continuance of symbolic hereditary monarchies. The United States has not adopted such policies, and until it does, McDonagh insightfully warns, American women run for office with a troubling disadvantage.

Download or read book Women s Organizations and Democracy in South Africa written by Shireen Hassim and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 2006-06-26 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transition to democracy in South Africa was one of the defining events in twentieth-century political history. The South African women’s movement is one of the most celebrated on the African continent. Shireen Hassim examines interactions between the two as she explores the gendered nature of liberation and regime change. Her work reveals how women’s political organizations both shaped and were shaped by the broader democratic movement. Alternately asserting their political independence and giving precedence to the democratic movement as a whole, women activists proved flexible and remarkably successful in influencing policy. At the same time, their feminism was profoundly shaped by the context of democratic and nationalist ideologies. In reading the last twenty-five years of South African history through a feminist framework, Hassim offers fresh insights into the interactions between civil society, political parties, and the state. Hassim boldly confronts sensitive issues such as the tensions between autonomy and political dependency in feminists’ engagement with the African National Congress (ANC) and other democratic movements, and black-white relations within women’s organizations. She offers a historically informed discussion of the challenges facing feminist activists during a time of nationalist struggle and democratization. Winner, Victoria Schuck Award for best book on women and politics, American Political Science Association “An exceptional study, based on extensive research. . . . Highly recommended.”—Choice “A rich history of women’s organizations in South African . . . . [Hassim] had observed at first hand, and often participated in, much of what she described. She had access to the informants and private archives that so enliven the narrative and enrich the analysis. She provides a finely balanced assessment.”—Gretchen Bauer, African Studies Review

Download or read book Compassionate Authority written by Kathleen B. Jones and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In COMPASSIONATE AUTHORITY Kathleen B. Jones takes up some of the most central debates in contemporary feminist analysis - debates concerning the nature of the categories of feminist theory, the development of alternative interpretative strategies in feminist theory, and the position of authority in both feminist theory and practice. Engaging the criticisms of feminist theory offered both by postmodernist feminists and the writings of feminists of color, and employing the textual strategies of feminist film theory, Jones reads canonical texts in modern political theory "against the grain." In doing so, she demonstrates the ways in which gender has been used to construct the paradigms of politics and the practices of authority. Jones explicates the historical roots of the definition of authority as sovereignty and considers the limited usefulness of this conceptualization for the feminist project. She counters this formulation of authority which has dominated political discourse for centuries with an alternative conceptualization of "compassionate authority." This feminist reconstruction of the theory and practice of authority provides a basis for the foundation of a new and meaningful order, for a "woman-friendly" polity. This work uses authority as the means to examine how political analysis is transformed by thinking through gender. In doing so, it makes an original and important contribution to the field of feminist political theory: a burgeoning field in which many political concepts have received rich and extensive treatment and yet, a field in which the question of authority has never before been systematically explored. Drawing on the writings of feminist philosophers, literarycritics, film theorists, and historians, as well as on the more orthodox texts of political theory, this book will have broad appeal to scholars and students of women's studies, political science, and a range of interdisciplinary studies.

Download or read book Islam Gender and Democracy in Comparative Perspective written by Jocelyne Cesari and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection reframes the debate around Islam and women's rights within a broader comparative literature that examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality.

Download or read book Engendering Democracy in Brazil written by Sonia E. Alvarez and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brazil has the tragic distinction of having endured the longest military-authoritarian regime in South America. Yet the country is distinctive for another reason: in the 1970s and 1980s it witnessed the emergence and development of perhaps the largest, most diverse, most radical, and most successful women's movement in contemporary Latin America. This book tells the compelling story of the rise of progressive women's movements amidst the climate of political repression and economic crisis enveloping Brazil in the 1970s, and it devotes particular attention to the gender politics of the final stages of regime transition in the 1980s. Situating Brazil in a comparative theoretical framework, the author analyzes the relationship between nonrevolutionary political change and changes in women's consciousness and mobilization. Her engaging analysis of the potentialities for promoting social justice and transforming relations of inequality for women and men in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World makes this book essential reading for all students and teachers of Latin American politics, comparative social movements and public policy, and women's studies and feminist political theory.

Download or read book Making Democracy written by James Ockey and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2004-08-31 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracy in Thailand is the result of a complex interplay of traditional and foreign attitudes. Although democratic institutions have been imported, participation in politics is deeply rooted in Thai village society. A contrasting strand of authoritarianism is present not only in the traditional culture of the royal court but also in the centralized bureaucracies and powerful armed services borrowed from the West. Both attitudes have helped to shape Thai democracy's specific character. This topical volume explores the importance of culture and the roles played by leadership, class, and gender in the making of Thai democracy. James Ockey describes changing patterns of leadership at all levels of society, from the cabinet to the urban middle class to the countryside, and suggests that such changes are appropriate to democratic government--despite the continuing manipulation of authoritarian patterns. He examines the institutions of democratic government, especially the political parties that link voters to the parliament. Political factions and the provincial notables that lead them are given careful attention. The failure to fully integrate the lower classes into the democratic system, Ockey argues, has been the underlying cause of many of the flaws of Thai democracy. Female political leadership, another imported notion, is better represented in urban rather than rural areas. Yet gender relations in villages were more equitable than at court, Ockey suggests, and these attitudes have persisted to this day. Successful women politicians from a variety of backgrounds have begun to overcome stereotypes associated with female leadership although barriers remain. With its wide-ranging analysis of Thai politics over the last three decades, Making Democracy is an important resource for both students and specialists.

Download or read book Digital Suffragists written by Marie Tessier and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it, by a New York Times comment moderator. If you’ve read the comments posted by readers of online news sites, you may have noticed the absence of women’s voices. Men are by far the most prolific commenters on politics and public affairs. When women do comment, they are often attacked or dismissed more than men are. In fact, the comment forums on news sites replicate conditions of the offline and social media worlds, where women are routinely interrupted, threatened, demeaned, and called wrong, unruly, disgusting, and out of place. In Digital Suffragists, Marie Tessier—a veteran journalist and a New York Times comment moderator for more than a decade—investigates why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it. The suffragists of the early twentieth century were jailed for trying to vote. Can a twenty-first century democracy be functional when half of the population is not fully represented in a primary form of political communication? Tessier shows that for online comments, it’s a design problem: the linear blog comment formula was based on deeply gender-biased assumptions. Technologies designed with a broad range of end users in mind, she points out, are more successful and beneficial than those that reflect the designer’s own habits of mind. Tessier outlines benchmarks for a more democratic media, all of which stem from one fundamental idea: media must adopt gender and racial representation as key performance indicators. Equal speaking time for women is a measure of democracy.

Download or read book Sharing Power written by Manon Tremblay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The representation of women in parliament is a subject of extensive research and a focus for political action in the last decade. The wide variation in women's parliamentary presence contradicts the expectation that established or consolidated democracies are more supportive of the presence of women in political life than emerging democracies. This volume explains this variation through a series of closely investigated case studies from the post-Communist transition democracies of Eastern Europe and emerging democracies in Asia and the Middle East to the long-established liberal democratic states. The volume examines the history of women's legislative involvement, clearly addressing the issue of equal opportunities for women in political life on a cross-national basis. It also identifies innovative solutions to redress the power-sharing balance between women and men. Offering a unique comparative perspective, Sharing Power will appeal to students and scholars of politics, women's studies, history and legislative studies.