Motherhood as a political identity grants women political legitimacy, enabling them to make rights-based claims. However, the efficacy and possibility of motherhood as a political identity is entangled in the sexist and racist narratives that are inextricable from white supremacy. In this article, I analyze the language used by the Mothers of the Movement (MothM) at the 2016 Democratic National Convention to demonstrate how the identities and experiences of Black women, specifically Black mothers, are co-opted and reproduced as deficient, criminal, and irrelevant, thereby limiting their ability to make claims as mothers and citizens. How, then, can marginalized mothers confront the tools of white supremacy, which portray them as “bad” mothers and “bad” citizens, to be heard within the dominant order without conforming to it? I contend that in appropriating the very discourses and spaces that seek to exclude and subjugate them, the MothM demonstrate the hypocrisy of the system of “good motherhood”—all the while reaffirming their status as equal citizens deserving of political recognition. Drawing from Black feminist thinkers, I demonstrate how motherhood and the rights that the MothM claim as mothers can be conceptualized as assertions of freedom and equal citizenship.

This article considers Mary Wollstonecraft as a theorist of freedom for women through the lens of social constructivism. Previous republican readings of Wollstonecraft as promoting a vision of freedom as independence or non-domination are compromised by their underpinnings in liberal individualism. Instead, we suggest her theory displays elements of positive liberty and particularly what we call “subjectivity freedom.” Reading Wollstonecraft as an early social constructivist, we show her grappling with how women's subjectivity is constructed in patriarchal societies such that they desire the conditions of their own subordination. This troubles the very notion of domination and its putative opposite, freedom-as-independence. Paradoxically, while noting how women's sense of self was profoundly and intimately shaped by the patriarchal structures they inhabited, Wollstonecraft's own argument was limited by these same constructions. Nonetheless, she struggled to conceive a radically emancipatory vision of women's lives, aspirations, and desires from within the confines of a context and discourse premised on their devaluation. A social constructivist approach shows that Wollstonecraft sought not simply to change women or specific structures of male dominance, but rather the processes within which men and women defined gender, the family, and personal identity: in short, their subjectivity.

Women have organized around their gendered identity to accomplish political goals both inside and outside legislatures. Formal and informal institutional norms shape the form this collective action takes and whether it is successful. What, then, are the favorable conditions for organizing women's caucuses inside legislatures? Using an original dataset and employing an event history analysis, we identify the institutional conditions under which women's caucuses emerged in the 50 US states from 1972 to 2009. Within a feminist institutional framework, we argue that women's ability to alter existing organizational structures and potentially affect gender norms within legislatures is contextual. Although we find that women's presence in conjunction with Democratic Party control partially explains women's ability to act collectively and in a bipartisan way within legislatures, our analysis suggests that institutional-level variables are not enough to untangle this complicated phenomenon. Our work explains how gender and party interact to shape legislative behavior and clarifies the intractability of institutional norms while compelling further qualitative evidence to uncover the best conditions for women's collective action within legislatures.

Much research examining gender bias in politics analyzes responses to explicit survey questions asking individuals whether they prefer male over female leaders or agree that male political leaders are superior. Drawing insights from the measurement of other types of prejudice, this article explores the methodological shortcomings of a widely used question of this type. Analyzing the results of two surveys—one national and one state-level—I compare response patterns to a standard, highly explicit question that is frequently administered by the Pew Research Center with those for a modestly altered item that employs multiple strategies to reduce social desirability bias. Compared with the alternative measure, the conventional item seriously underreports prejudice against women leaders. Moreover, the underreporting of bias is especially prevalent among individuals belonging to groups that are strong advocates of gender equality.

Do international treaties lead to cross-national increases in women's rights? In contrast to Asal, Brown, and Figueroa's (2008) suggestion that the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) is not an important factor in explaining the liberalization of abortion rights polices, this article argues that the treaty contributes to increases in abortion rights when the terms of ratification are disaggregated. Previous excursions into this question have only considered whether a state has ratified the treaty, which is problematic from both a methodological and theoretical standpoint given that many states ratified with conditions, while only six states did not ratify at all. Additionally, some states ratified the Optional Protocol and some have not. We demonstrate that the disaggregation of levels of treaty ratification is associated with increases in women's rights in a model replicating that of Asal, Brown, and Figueroa. Further, we extend our knowledge of the dynamics of treaty ratification through the use of structural equations to more fully model how political, cultural, and economic factors, as well as exogenous international pressures, interact to produce changes in women's rights around the world.

Do political gender stereotypes exist in egalitarian settings in which all parties nominate women? Do they matter for candidate selection in systems of proportional representation with multiparty competition and preferential voting? To date, these questions remain unanswered because related research is limited to the U.S. case. Our pioneering study examines political stereotypes in one of the “least likely” cases, Finland—a global forerunner in gender equality. We find, first, that stereotypes persist even in egalitarian paradises. Second, when testing across settings of candidate choice, we find that the effect varies greatly: political gender stereotypes are powerful in hypothetical choices, but they work neither in favor of nor against female candidates when many “real,” viable, experienced, and incumbent female candidates are competing. Although in open-list systems with preferential voting, gender stereotypes can directly affect female candidates’ electoral success, in Finland, their actual impact in real legislative elections appears marginal.

This article presents an analysis of how activists, politicians, and the media framed youth involvement in the sex trade during the 1970s, the 1990s, and the 2000s in the United States. Across these periods of public concern about the issue, similar framing has recurred that has drawn upon gendered and racialized notions of victimization and perpetration. This frame has successfully brought attention to this issue by exploiting public anxieties at historical moments when social change was threatening white male dominance. Using intersectional feminist theory, I argue that mainstream rhetoric opposing the youth sex trade worked largely within neoliberal logics, ignoring histories of dispossession and structural violence and reinforcing individualistic notions of personhood and normative ideas about subjectivity and agency. As part of the ongoing project of racial and gender formation in US society, this discourse has shored up neoliberal governance, particularly the build-up of the prison industrial complex, and it has obscured the state's failure to address the myriad social problems that make youth vulnerable to the sex trade.

This article presents a qualitative analysis of profeminist Islamic women public figures’ discourses in the abortion debate in Turkey in 2012. The aim is to reveal the possibilities and limitations of achieving an intersectional and egalitarian profeminist collaboration on the Islamic-secular axis in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on recent feminist scholarship on coalition politics, the article exposes the fluctuations of meaning and the shifting frames of reference in these women's narratives and relates this hybrid, dynamic narrative quality to profeminist Islamic women's unique social location. It also elaborates on the blockage points in these narratives that hinder coalitional ways of thinking. Within this frame, this article suggests that in a social and political context that has witnessed a striking upsurge of antifeminist gender politics in the last decade, the building of coalitional profeminist politics beyond the Islamic-secular divide can be facilitated by shifting the focus from the apparently irreconcilable character of ideological positionings and lived experiences toward coalitional rhetorical strategies and intermediary narrative lines in profeminist subjects’ accounts.

Concepts such as risk aversion and anxiety have received renewed attention in various strands of gender and politics research. Most contemporary scholars suggest that gender gaps in this area are related to social norms and stem from social learning rather than from inherent gender traits. Very few, however, elaborate on the gender variable to reach a fuller understanding of the dynamics at work. In this study, we examined gender gaps in levels of anxiety, an area closely related to risk aversion, and we applied a combination of categorical measures of gender distinguishing between “woman, “man,” and “other” and scales capturing grades of femininity and masculinity in individuals. We label this approach fuzzy gender, and we suggest that it can be used to advance research in our field. The key finding is an interaction effect between categorical measures of gender and fuzzy gender: The more female characteristics in women, the higher the levels of anxiety. Moreover, there is no difference in levels of anxiety between men and women with few female characteristics. The data used draw from a large-scale survey among Swedish citizens in 2013.

In this study, we examine substantive representation of women in the 2011–15 Turkish Parliament by focusing on sponsorship of private members’ bills by members of parliament (MPs) across eight major issue areas. The Turkish case offers new insights into women's representation, not only because this topic is unexplored in the Turkish context but also because it provides an opportunity to examine the tension between gender as a social identity and ideology as a political identity in a legislature characterized by disciplined political parties and low gender parity. Findings indicate that women MPs in Turkey substantively represent women by sponsoring more bills on women's rights and equality issues than their male colleagues, despite their low numbers in parliament and affiliation with highly disciplined parties. Party ideology also shapes women MPs’ issue priorities depending on the emphasis placed by the parties on different issue areas. Whereas left-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on women's rights and equality issues defined with a feminist accent, right-wing women MPs sponsor more bills on issues regarding children and family. Left-wing women also differ significantly from right-wing women in their sponsorship of bills on health and social affairs issues, as left-wing parties prioritize those issues more than right-wing parties.

Are female politicians less likely to be promoted to specific ministerial posts, and is it important for them to toe the party line? This article focuses on whether the selection of ministers has a gender-specific dimension. Building on role congruity theory and research showing that female and male politicians are evaluated in a different manner in leadership positions, we present some original hypotheses. For example, we hypothesize that female politicians are less likely to be appointed to cabinet when they have held gender-incongruent committee positions in parliament. We also hypothesize that women are less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have previously deviated from the party line. In an empirical analysis of Swedish ministerial appointments in six cabinets, we find that female politicians were less likely to be appointed to cabinet posts when they have held positions in ‘masculine’ parliamentary committees and when they deviated from the party line in their parliamentary speeches. These results suggest that women are more harshly judged when holding positions that are not in line with traditional gender stereotypes and have important implications for our understanding of gender and political leadership.

Policy documents are a source of authority in both a legal and a normative sense. When policy documents make particular assumptions about care work requiring private, not public, consideration, this can push care, its concerns, and those who give and receive care out of the public sphere. This marginalization of care work, however, is ethically suspect, and as such I argue here that we should use the feminist ethics of care as a way to analyze current policy and guide the creation of future policy to ensure more ethically robust policy statements. I advocate for the use of care ethics in addition to human rights ethically guided public policy, which prioritizes the effort to implement human rights standards through government action. My claim is that human rights should not be our sole basis for moral and political reasoning, especially in the policy process. Policy shapes our lives, and how we live in relation to particular others. Care ethics can and should be used as an ethical guide for the policy process because it can bring to the fore how institutional patterns of power shape our relations, an analysis that human rights theories are not, in general, built to undertake.

What effects do financial crises have on women's well-being? While much research has addressed various socio-economic and political consequences of financial crises, the gendered impact of financial crises are empirically underexplored. Moreover, extant literature has mainly focused on specific crises or countries with little attempt at determining possible common effects and patterns across the world. To provide broader insight into the gendered consequences of financial crises, we examined the degree to which five types of financial crises—banking crises, currency crises, domestic sovereign debt crises, external sovereign debt crises, and inflation crises—affect women's health and educational outcomes as well as their participation in the formal economy and politics. We also examined the persistence of these effects in the postcrisis years. The results from a panel of 68 countries for the years 1980 to 2010 indicate that financial crises undermine women's participation in the formal workforce, their presence in politics, their educational attainment, and their health outcomes. We also found significant lingering effects of financial crises: the deleterious gendered effects of crises persist even seven years after the end of a crisis.

Building upon the theoretical framework of Italian activist and scholar Antonio Gramsci, and using historical and public administrative sources, this article argues that while social justice feminism as a social movement in the United States declined by 1940, former participants continued their counter-hegemonic actions after World War II. Facing a new political and cultural hegemony increasingly dominated by fears of atomic annihilation, Soviet domination, and domestic Communist infiltration, women progressives, such as Frieda Miller and Esther Peterson, developed new approaches to continuing their counter-hegemonic aims, particularly through reviving an alternative view of public administration. Miller and Peterson thus helped prepare the way for women's activism in the United States to shift from economic security to equal rights by the mid-1960s, thus establishing an increasingly effective counter-hegemonic effort against the continuing patriarchal hegemony.