How should scholars view and relate to activism and social change? Concern over this question is neither new nor limited to political scientists. Nevertheless, because of the special relationship between our academic enterprise and the larger women's movement outside the academy, this concern is particularly acute for those of us who approach the study of politics from a feminist perspective.

As I write, descriptive representation by gender improves substantive outcomes for women in every polity for which we have a measure. And as I write, significant representation by gender cannot be achieved in any existing polity without some form of quota. At this historical moment, therefore, quotas play an important democratic role in increasing gender equality. Yet because quotas potentially produce institutional rigidity and their need should decrease as structural and cultural conditions improve, it is best to institute them in their most flexible form. Because quotas also encourage essentialism, it is best to institute them in conjunction with major efforts to define in nonessentialist ways the reasons for their institution. Although quotas will inevitably increase essentialist beliefs, a conscious, concerted campaign could mitigate the most destructive effects of this tendency.Many thanks to Lisa Baldez for help in editing these thoughts. Comments welcome: jane_mansbridge@harvard.edu.

Is there a common language of gender in political science research? One might expect the answer to be no, given the wide range of ways in which scholars employ the concept of gender in empirical and theoretical research. I maintain, however, that a common language of gender does exist and that we must articulate it in explicit terms in order to advance the way we build knowledge in this field. In this contribution to “Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics,” I suggest two ways in which to employ “gender” as part of a common language that the subfield can employ for the purposes of empirical political research: gender as a category and as a process.

Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff's insightful critical perspective in the first issue of this journal makes several important points about the relationship between modernization and gender equality. We agree with Adams and Orloff that—despite strong claims to the contrary (e.g., Young 2003)—modernization tends to be conducive to gender equality. And we also agree that the classic versions of modernization theory were inadequate. The basic insight that economic and technological development tends to bring coherent patterns of social and political change holds up well in the light of a large body of recent evidence; but previous models of modernization were mechanical and linear, and they omitted cultural factors that cannot be ignored. We join forces with Adams and Orloff in striving to develop a more adequate concept of modernization, recognizing that understanding ongoing processes of socioeconomic change is a long-term task that will need input from many perspectives.

As Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff rightly point out, one of the purposes of my essay “The Logic of Masculinist Protection: Reflections on the Current Security State” (2003) is to complicate our understanding of what it means to view events, institutions, and ideas under a gender lens. Our society exhibits multiple logics of gender, that is, in varying ways that “masculinity” and “femininity,” as well as less heterosexual gender ideas, are defined and interpreted. In that essay, I suggest that a traditional meaning of masculinity less noticed recently by feminists, that of the husband/father as loving protector, has been mobilized by the Bush administration to justify both war abroad and the domestic contraction of civil liberties. Part of the lesson I wish to draw for feminist theory is that these varying gender logics may have loose or contradictory relationships to the comportments of actual men and women, especially today. Some women may stand in “masculine” positions, as soldiers or firefighters, and many men may stand in “feminine” positions, as fearful and protected citizens. Gender is better thought of as a set of ideational and social structural relationships that people move through, rather than attributes they have attached to their persons.

How do we find gender in data from individuals?

I should start by saying what I mean by gender. I take gender to be, in part, the “values, norms and demands the female human being—precisely because she is female—comes up against in her encounter with the Other” (Moi 1999, 79). And, in part, it is what women and men make of the systematic way social interactions, structures, and institutions are organized around gender.

Are gender quotas a good idea? Yes, for two reasons: Quotas are an effective mechanism for improving women's numerical representation, and they encourage new attitudes towards women in politics. I argue that the numerical and ideational gains brought by gender quotas outweigh the potential pitfalls they might introduce. From a pragmatic standpoint, quotas constitute an imperfect means to a positive end: women's political empowerment. What is more, formal rules may become norms, reinforcing changing attitudes.I would like to thank Marilyn Dantico, Kim Fridkin, Adrian Pantoja, Becki Scola, and the editors of Politics & Gender for their constructive comments on this essay.

During a discussion of my first book manuscript with a senior colleague, he informed me that an academic “best-seller” actually sells about 2,000 book copies. I was stunned. All this work and even if I am wildly successful, only 2,000 copies will circulate in the world? My colleague intended, I suppose, to humble me. Even more, it threw me into doubt (how could I have gotten so far and still be so naive?), and I continue to wonder many years later, why do we all work so hard to gain such a small audience? Now that academic journals are online, we can calculate the number of hits or downloads for each article. The results are disheartening for any of us who want our research to have an impact outside our academic discipline or subfield, let alone an impact on political life. Why do we labor over journal articles that will be read by so few people? (Of course, I am aware that the number of readers is a dubious measure for “evidence of impact.” Yet I have seen the sales ranking of books on Amazon.com and the tally of citations netted by a publication appear in promotion files many times as measures of “impact on the field.” Full disclosure: my Amazon sales ranking at the time of this writing is 287,537.)

African-American women represent fewer than 5% of the doctoral degrees awarded in political science. There are only a handful of tenured black women in the nation's top-rated political science departments (Sarkees and McGlen 1999). There is no major text in the field that deals exclusively with the public opinion, political behavior, or institutional contributions of African-American women. Despite some recent notable exceptions, black women as authors of and subjects of research inquiry are still largely absent from the pages of periodicals that define the field. Many black women in political science are laboring in obscurity relative to the profession. “African American women faculty continue to be concentrated among the lower ranks, primarily in non-tenured positions, promoted at a slower rate, paid less than their male and white female counterparts, located in traditional disciplines, and primarily employed by two year colleges,” according to Sheila Gregory (1999, 11). Even from this position on the margin, black women political scientists have contested the field, challenged the academy, and contributed to the development of more just communities.

With respect to modernity and women's place in it, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris and Iris Marion Young are sharply at odds. Young sees a rending and tearing of the social fabric, and no determinate relationship between gender equality and modernity, while Inglehart and Norris think modernization and women's rights are seamlessly joined at the hip. We think that neither of these analytical stances will do. Our assessment extends from a concept of modernity that embraces a relational complex of features and tendencies—one that is analytical, not normative, and that must always be historically situated. Modernity is a vulnerable achievement rather than the secure culmination of automatic social processes. When called to its defense, we have argued, feminists and small-d democrats may sometimes have to endorse means and modes of coercion controlled by imperfectly democratic states.For their criticisms and suggestions, we thank Rachel Epstein, Bonnie Honig, David Weakliem, and Linda Zerilli. They bear no responsibility for the substance of our rejoinder, even if their arguments with us did help us think it through.

October 3, 2005, marks a dozen years since Argentina started the quota ball rolling via the first use of gender quota legislation applying to all parties for the election of national legislators. For the October 3, 1993, Argentine Chamber of Deputies election, all political parties were required to present closed party lists on which women accounted for a minimum of 30% of the candidates, and furthermore, a comparable proportion of these women had to be placed in “electable” positions on the lists (Jones 1996). Although the initial implementation process was not free of problems (Durrieu 1999), in a short time the gender quota became an established fixture of the Argentine political system. The impact of the quota legislation on the representation of women in the Argentine congress was nothing short of dramatic, with women now accounting for 34% and 44% of the seats in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies and Senate, respectively, a marked contrast to the situation prior to the adoption of the quota legislation, when women on average held a mere 5% of the seats in both legislative bodies.

Since its emergence in the 1970s, feminist scholarship has claimed to be corrective and transformative. Through original research about the experiences of the majority of the world's population, that is, women, feminist scholars have sought to correct omissions and distortions that permeate political science. Through the use of gender as an analytical tool, they have illuminated social and political relations neglected by mainstream accounts, advanced alternative explanations of political phenomena, demonstrated the defects of competing hypotheses, and debunked opposing views. Despite such impressive accomplishments, feminist political science has not become a dominant paradigm within the discipline. Few doctoral programs allow students to develop areas of concentration in feminist approaches to political studies. Few routinely include feminist scholarship in proseminars in American politics, comparative politics, international relations, political theory, public law, or public policy. None requires familiarity with leading feminist scholarship as a criterion of professional competence.

I begin with a series of “starting points” (rendered simplistically, without the nuance, supporting argumentation for, and qualifications of them that warrant elaboration). These offer a context for the next section: assessing the contributions and activism of feminist scholars. I then consider prevailing—in contrast to feminist—analyses of power and schematically detail the contributions of feminist theory/practice. This illuminates what I consider our most productive, politically consequential, and transformative insight: theorizing “feminization as denigration.” A concluding section explores why feminists face so much resistance and what is at stake in persevering.

Gender and Civil Society: Transcending Boundaries. Edited by Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. 257 pp. $125.00.

This book provides a welcome addition to the ever-growing comparative scholarship on gender politics and the state. Editors Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan bring together a group of experts with the ideal blend of country expertise and understanding about comparative analysis and theoretical issues to systematically map out and operationalize the concept of “civil society” in a cross-national study of the interface between women's organizations and the state. Howell raises the central analytical problem of the book in the introduction. While the concept of civil society has great promise for understanding how, why, and to what extent women organize and seek to influence the state, comparative gender and politics analysts have shied away from using the term; comparativists and political theorists have basically ignored the quite obviously gendered aspects of civil society. As this edited volume convincingly asserts, intersecting the study of civil society with comparative gender research moves the two areas much further along by compelling “researchers to gauge their understanding of empirical civil societies, to question the assumptions about the relationship between democratization, civil society and gender equality and to query the idea of civil society and feminism as universally valid concepts” (p. 246).

Jailbait: The Politics of Statutory Rape Laws in the United States. By Carolyn E. Cocca. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2004. 228 pp. Paper $21.95.

Carolyn Cocca notes at the outset of her book that she is interested not only in the nuts and bolts of morality policy but also in how the narratives about those policies circulate and justify, in this case, the regulation of sexuality. The book breaks ground in its sustained attention to an issue that has been insufficiently addressed by political scientists.

At the 2005 meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Claudine Gay and Wendy Smooth organized a roundtable to reflect on the politics of studying gender. In my intervention there, I argued that pervasive ignorance of what gender is results in misrecognition of the work we do. Most people do not know what it means to study gender. When we say gender they think we mean women, sexuality, feminist theory, an epistemological position, or a political movement. Such misrecognition marginalizes our research, creating problems for publishing and promotion. How can we combat it? By arming ourselves intellectually.

In the wake of 9/11 and the subsequent struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq, gender has become even more obviously important for understanding contemporary world politics, including armed conflict and war. Gender is an explicit structuring principle of contemporary conflicts between Western powers and an Islamist fundamentalism energized by opposition to the freedoms enjoyed by Western women and committed to the imposition of a version of sharia that explicitly denies to women rights equal to men's.

Sex and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy and the Economics of Fertility. By Phillip B Levine. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2004. 240 pp. $35.00.

From the title alone it appears that either the author and his editor know little about sex and gender research or they think that any book with “sex” in the title will sell, or both. Thus, it is fortunate that the subtitle does accurately describe the contents of the book: an economic analysis of the consequences of changes in abortion law and policy on fertility behavior.

Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender and the New Racism. By Patricia Hill Collins. New York: Routledge. 2004. 374 pp. $26.00.

To a large extent, scholarship on black politics often focuses primarily on institutions, rule of law, processes, political actors, and citizens but with very little attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In contrast, the principal aim of this book is to explore what the author sees as the inextricable links between racism and gender. The basic thesis of this well-written, important, and provocative book is that the fight against racism, especially the “new racism,” can never be won without first challenging sexism, which simultaneously oppresses African-American men and women.

Political Women: The Women's Movement, Political Institutions, the Battle for Women's Suffrage and the ERA. By Alana S. Jeydel. New York: Routledge. 2004. 223 pp. $125.00.

Resource mobilization theory and, more recently, political process/opportunity theories dominate the study of social movements. The pioneering work of Jo Freeman and Anne Costain uses these theories to explain the emergence and mobilization of the contemporary U.S. women's movement. According to this perspective, women's movements have the incentive to act when their chances for success are high. They take advantage of new opportunities and open new ones for themselves. These opportunities are a function of their internal resources and of external factors, such as governmental structures and rules that provide access. Because the U.S. women's movement often has been more oriented toward changing gender role norms and practices, rather than achieving rights, it has received relatively little attention from political opportunity structure (POS) scholars.