Conservative political actors appear rather troubling for many gender and politics scholars and feminist activists. What should we make of their claims to represent women? How should we best understand their actions? This article, based on a critical rereading of the empirical literature and informed by contemporary representation theory, develops a new conceptual framework for assessing the quality of women's substantive representation by conservatives. We find that under specified conditions, conservative representatives do further women's substantive representation. A first set of conditions relates to conservative claims to represent women. These are considered to be “for women” when they marry conservative women's concerns in society; when conservative representatives act and do not simply engage in rhetoric; and when their actions are not undercut by other acts, policies, or outcomes unfavorable to women. A second set of criteria considers the quality of the process of women's substantive representation. We contend that a feminist process of deliberation about women's interests can include conservative claims as long as they meet the requirements of responsiveness, inclusiveness, and egalitarianism.

Parties are the key actors shaping women's representation in advanced parliamentary democracies. Based on traditional patterns of feminist organizing, conventional wisdom suggests that parties of the left are the strongest advocates for women. Despite the prevalence of this claim, a burgeoning body of work indicates that parties on the right can—and often do—seek to represent women. To address these competing narratives, this article offers the first large-N, party-level study of women's descriptive and substantive representation over place and time. The results suggest that party ideology continues to affect women's representation: right parties lag behind their left counterparts with respect to women's presence in elected office, and right and left parties address women differently on their platforms. At the same time, there is significant heterogeneity among right parties. Christian democrats, for example, are more likely than conservatives to adopt voluntary gender quotas and make policy claims on behalf of women. The traditional left-right distinction is thus too coarse to fully explain party behavior in these states.

The question of conservative feminism in the United States did not really arise before the 2008 elections; most politically active conservative women leaders did not refer to themselves as feminists. Sarah Palin's vice presidential bid, however, prompted a shift. On a number of well-publicized occasions, Palin called herself a feminist, generating considerable discussion over whether conservative feminism is now a political movement. Using data from in-depth interviews with conservative women leaders, this article asks whether conservative women in the United States identify as feminists. Findings indicate that on the whole they do not, but conservative women are important gender-conscious political actors whose efforts compel questions about ideology and women's activism. Implications for understanding feminist and conservative movement politics more broadly are also explored.

This contribution to the Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism uses expert and election surveys to explore the extent to which the feminist or traditional gender ideology of parties of the right relates to their economic and liberal/authoritarian ideology. We show that although parties of the left generally espouse more feminist ideologies than parties of the right, there are a significant number of rightist parties in Western Europe that combine laissez-faire economic values with liberal feminist ideals. That said, there is more homogeneity among parties of the populist radical right than rightist parties more generally. We find that despite some variation in their gender ideology, parties of the populist radical right overwhelmingly—with the exception of one party in the Netherlands—continue to adopt traditional or antifeminist gender ideologies. In terms of attracting women voters, we find that rightist parties who adopt a feminist gender ideology are able to attract more women voters than other parties of the right. We detect several examples of center-right parties that include feminist elements in their gender ideologies and are able to win over larger proportions of women voters than rightist parties that fail to adopt feminist positions.

Very little in my adult life has made me feel my feminism so strongly as the 2016 defeat of Hillary Rodham Clinton. And by “defeat,” I mean her utter evisceration by the press, many Bernie Sanders supporters, the Donald Trump campaign, and a shocking number of regular Americans. The disgusting patriarchal bacchanalia that occurred during the campaign has nearly been matched by the attacks on Clinton that have continued since the election. She has been criticized even for writing a memoir of the election, What Happened, a book that has been variously called too long to read (Frank 2017) and an exercise in shifting responsibility (Zurcher 2017).

After the publication of What Happened, much attention was directed toward analyzing and commenting on a section of Hillary Rodham Clinton's book that detailed her thinking in a split-second situation during one of the presidential debates with Donald Trump. Clinton explains that during the second debate, which occurred just days after the release of the famous Access Hollywood tape in which Trump “bragged about groping women” (Clinton 2017, 136), Trump was more or less following her around the small stage, “staring at [her], making faces” (136). She notes that it was “incredibly uncomfortable. He was literally breathing down my neck” (136). But she also considers her response to Trump's physically threatening demeanor during the debate and whether she responded appropriately or “correctly.” Clinton kept her cool—she kept going in the face of what she describes as a physically menacing situation. She refused to be “rattled” by Trump's proximate presence or by the individuals he invited to sit in the audience to intimidate her.

On September 11, 2016, less than two months before Election Day, Hillary Clinton attended the 9/11 memorial service in New York City. Reportedly, Clinton left the event early, and as she was getting into her SUV, she fainted. A bystander caught on camera a wobbly Clinton needing assistance getting into her vehicle, which he posted to Twitter, where it immediately circulated (Kafka 2016). News media outlets soon picked it up and were quick to air the footage. Initially, the Clinton campaign explained that Clinton had been “overheated.” Later that afternoon, however, the campaign announced that two days prior, Clinton had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia, and despite being advised to rest, she had attended the memorial event.

“Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!” This battle cry erupted at one Donald Trump rally after another throughout the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump even threatened to jail Hillary Rodham Clinton (HRC) if he won the election. “Crooked Hillary” emerged as Trump's disparaging nickname for his Democratic opponent. Taking a further moralistic step, Trump equated HRC with pure evil, calling her the “devil” at an August 2016 campaign rally in Pennsylvania.

Hillary Clinton's memoir of the 2016 election and her life in politics, What Happened, is an affective rollercoaster. Wrath, frustration, regret, and sorrow, among other intensified emotions, saturate the book's pages. This range of affect is surprising for a political autobiography. Books in this genre typically present their subject-selves as stalwart and emotionally controlled actors whose range of feeling is limited to the proper amount of righteous irritation or vague empathy necessary to justify a policy proposal. None has the rawness of Clinton's book, a rawness that is, I would argue, made possible by her gender. This is one of the few vectors of political expression that is expanded, not contracted, for Clinton in her role as the first woman to become a major-party presidential candidate.

As noted in the introduction to this issue of Politics & Gender, for this Special Issue on Gender and Conservatism, we have coordinated the book review section with the thematics of the volume's four research articles. This lends the volume an intellectual cohesion that we hope will prove engaging, as it also expands the purview of topics that come into play where the intersections of conservatism and feminism are concerned. The books reviewed here suggest the rich diversity of the scholarly work that is now being generated on this question.