A recent wave of gender and politics research revisits the concept of “women's interests,” opening up new ways of thinking about who can articulate these interests and how to avoid essentialism in empirical analysis on women's substantive representation. This article seeks to advance these debates by integrating them with new work on political theory noting that speaking “for” a group also entails speaking “about” a group. Resolving some of the tensions presenting in existing work, the revised approach expands the range of actors engaged in making claims on behalf of “women” and draws a conceptual distinction between “issues,” broad policy categories, and “interests,” the content given to a particular issue. The contours of this new approach are illustrated via a comparative study of claims-making on behalf of “women” in three countries, revealing some overlaps but also important differences in the issues raised and arguments made regarding the nature of “women's interests.” This inductive method avoids problems of essentialism by arguing that “women” and “women's interests” are constructed through, and not simply reflected in, political advocacy on their behalf.

Does the descriptive representation of gender affect how constituents respond to their legislators' substantive policy records? Previous work offers two distinctly opposing theories: the first, that descriptive representation may weaken accountability for substantive representation, if it leads female constituents to misperceive the incumbent's positions or give them a “free pass” on policy congruence; the second, that it may strengthen accountability, if it leads female constituents to pay greater attention to the incumbent and his or her record. Using survey data from three electoral cycles, I show that women are more likely to correctly identify their U.S. senators' policy records and weigh that record more heavily in their evaluations when they are represented by women. The descriptive representation of gender thus strengthens the links between the policy positions legislators take in office and how they are evaluated by their constituents.

In countries around the world, constitutional protections of women's rights have provided a legal foundation to combat discriminatory laws, customs, and actions and a catalyst for advances in gender equality. This article draws on newly available data from 191 countries to analyze women's constitutional rights across the spheres of general equality and nondiscrimination, political participation, social and economic rights, family life, and customary and religious law. We examined how gender-specific and universal protections differed according to a constitution's year of adoption and last amendment, and identified regional patterns that persisted across all decades. Women were explicitly guaranteed general equality or nondiscrimination in 81% of constitutions, some aspect of political equality in 32%, marital equality in 27%, some aspect of work equality in 26%, and equal educational rights in 9% of constitutions. Protection of women's rights increased substantially between 1980 and 2011. As of June 2011, however, no constitution in the Middle East and North Africa guaranteed gender-specific protection in education, work, or marriage, and there were no guarantees of marital equality in South Asian constitutions. Of the constitutions that protected some aspect of gender equality, 5% stated that customary or religious laws could prevail over constitutional provisions.

A large literature on the United States and Western Europe establishes that there is a correlation between gender and legislator activity. The article extends the literature to India by exploring a unique dataset of Question Hour activity in the lower house of parliament over a 30-year period (1980–2009). Compared with male legislators, female legislators ask 24% fewer parliamentary questions, and there are also significant differences in question content, even after controlling for important covariates. However, it is likely that female and male legislators differ on unobserved attributes that affect legislative activity. Using the intuition that the gender of winners in close elections between women and men is quasi-randomly determined, the article employs a regression discontinuity design to reestimate the gender effect. The results indicate that gender has zero causal effect on the volume of questions and most types of question content.

Most would concur that the American state, from its very founding and still today, builds upon liberal principles asserting the fundamental equality of all individuals. What is more, social movements have been successful in demanding that the state treat all individuals the same “in spite of” their group differences, thereby promoting the inclusion of people initially discriminated against on the basis of their group difference. This is no small task, as history tells us. For example, we have recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington and the Civil Rights Movement, which exemplify the demand for equal treatment of individuals “in spite of” their race. John Lewis, an African-American civil rights activist, testifies, for example, as to how difficult this was, based on his experience fifty years ago. When he traveled during those times, he ran into racial segregation everywhere, including housing, hotels, restaurants, and public restrooms. His goal was desegregation—that is, to integrate public facilities so that all individuals would have access on equal bases with everyone else (Stolberg 2013).

The question of whether or not we still need a women's movement is legitimate and important, but it usually presumes a conflation of women with feminist. Certainly, significant gains in women's rights and status are due to decades of feminist activism, but feminists have not been the only ones advocating on behalf of women. Indeed, as long as there have been feminist women's movements, there have been conservative women contesting them. The increase in the number of conservative women running for office and the growth of a conservative women's movement prompts further questions about identity and representation, women's interests, and the future of feminism itself.

Rape crisis centers, which provide supportive services to survivors of sexual assault, are commonly lauded as one of the most successful and lasting transformations achieved by second-wave feminism (Bevacqua 2000; Martin 2005; Schmitt and Martin 2007). But the advocates who work in these centers overwhelmingly reject the use of the word “feminist” to describe themselves or the work of their agencies (Campbell, Baker, and Mazurak 1998; Corrigan 2013; Maier 2008). Here, I describe this puzzling disconnect between feminist consciousness and feminist practice and offer a theory of why the incorporation of feminist analysis could enrich the provision of services on the ground.

It is important to take the time and look both backward and forward at the women's movement: how it has influenced the past and how it is likely to be important in the future. But why do we ask this question in the first place?

There are many good reasons why we still need a women's movement in this country. Here I shall focus on just one: I argue that we need a women's movement to recruit and support women as candidates for public office.

In my Sex, Power, and Politics class it is often easy to convince students of the ways in which feminist political activism is radically different from the women's movements of the 19th century. Grappling with how “slut shaming” has changed from Hawthorne's story of Hester Prynne (The Scarlet Letter) to Emma Stone's ironic performance in the film Easy A to pop star Miley Cyrus' “twerking” in an MTV performance with singer Robin Thicke is an easy feat for my late-millennial generation students. They are far less comfortable, however, with the idea that there are troubling continuities in the topics of that political activism. It is thus harder for them to see the continuities and ongoing challenges as part of a longstanding rationale for a perpetual women's movement. These continuities are seen more clearly by baby boomer feminists, the bulk of whom came to consciousness as second-wave feminists.

Regardless of the country where one lives, gendered discrimination and outright misogyny are commonplace. In particular, violence against women remains one of the most widespread and pervasive challenges to women's rights. It crosses all boundaries, geographical and social. Economic inequalities within and across countries continue to expand with gendered patterns. Significant gaps remain in education, employment, and healthcare, among many other things. So, the answer to the question, “Do we need a women's movement?” seems obvious. But what form should the mobilization take? Is it the work of a women's movement? A feminist movement? Where do other social justice movements fit in? Where should mobilization take place: locally, nationally, transnationally, or globally? How do we deal with difference? Can universal messages that unite across borders also deal with the unique circumstances of particular locations? In this piece, I pick up on some of the themes raised by other participants in this forum and elaborate on them in global perspective. My intent is not to apply logics of the United States movements elsewhere, but instead to propose insight gathered from broader comparative and transnational studies that might be applied to this discussion.