The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order. By Gretchen Ritter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 400p. $70.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Gretchen Ritter takes the American Constitution seriously. Like few others, she views the country's fundamental charter as announcing far more than a design for government institutions and a series of individual rights guarantees. The importance of the Constitution, she insists, extends deeper than can be captured by examining the text's most obvious features. It “creates and regulates a social order” (p. 8), a comprehensive understanding of public and private life. “The constitutional order acts as an instrument of social design,” claims Ritter; it endorses certain relationships over others, while also choosing to recognize certain members of the polity as privileged (p. 9). Traditional conceptions of the marital relationship or of the role of particular classes of people in the public realm, for example, are fostered and perpetuated by the constitutional scheme, not because the words of the text necessarily command it but because the nature of a constitution—an instrument that embraces a particular political and social order—makes it so.