What do we know about women, politics, and democracy in the United States? The past thirty years have witnessed an explosion of research on women in American politics alongside the dramatic increase in women's political participation and the transformations that women have effected in the American political system during this same period. As women take on new roles and face changing political (and social and economic) climates, their experiences and contributions to American democracy continue to evolve. Our scholarship has evolved as well. Understanding the contributions and experiences of half of the population provides fundamental insight into how American democracy works. Thus each chapter in this volume asks: What does existing research tell us about political women in the United States, and what do we need to understand better? What does and should our scholarship reveal about the opportunities and challenges women face as political actors in the American political system? What do we know, and what more do we need to know, about how American democracy is affected by the presence – and absence – of political women? Overall, this volume provides a critical synthesis of more than three decades of scholarly literature on women, gender, and American politics within political science.

What began as an “ill-formed idea” (the subject heading of the October 2004 e-mail in which Wolbrecht first proposed the idea of a conference to Beckwith and Baldez) has resulted in a collection of critical essays that we hope will make a major contribution to scholarship on political women in American politics.