Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. By Joan Wallach Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. 2005. 184 pp. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

French women were granted full political rights in 1944, yet 50 years later, they accounted for only 6% of the members of the national assembly. In her book, Joan Scott discusses the constitutional reform adopted in 2000 to answer this chronic underrepresentation of women. Rather than engaging philosophical arguments, Scott adopts the perspective of an “historian of the present” (p. ix). She traces the movement for parité from its inception in the late 1980s among feminist groups and European bodies to the adoption of the law, after the movement lost much of its original trenchancy along its transposition into mainstream political discourse.