Less than a year ago, Politics & Gender made its debut at the American Political Science Association meetings in Washington, DC, at a reception graciously held by our publishers at Cambridge University Press. Past, present, and future presidents of the APSA, members of the Women and Politics Research Section, and scores of colleagues joined us to celebrate the publication of Volume I, Issue 1. We were buoyed by the enthusiastic reception but more than a little anxious about the work that lay ahead. Now, with four issues completed, we'd like to review what we've accomplished and reflect on the scholarly shape the journal has begun to take.

January 2006.

Although the idea of intersectionality has been widely accepted by social, political, and feminist theorists, little work on intersection has made its way into empirical studies within the social sciences. Because of the diversity of the California electorate, the 2003 California recall election provides a unique opportunity to explore differences in vote choice among women and men from different racial groups. In addition, the context of the recall, including the existence of allegations of sexual misconduct against one of the front-runners in the race for a replacement candidate, makes it an excellent case for testing the existence of intersection. We find that despite the unique nature of this election, partisanship was a significant predictor of vote choice. Additionally, we find that voting on the recall was racially polarized, and that gender affected vote choice more among whites than among other racial groups. These findings have important implications for theoretical models within the subfields of gender and politics and race and politics. At a minimum, our findings suggest that models testing for the effects of race, class, and gender in American society need to treat these factors as mutually constitutive categories of marginalization and privilege, rather than as simple, discrete categories.

This study explores how the state genders citizens' attitudes toward women by examining differences between East and West Germany in gender role attitudes since unification. Compared to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was a stronger supporter of women's employment, although the two countries did not differ greatly in their policies on women's roles within the family. Using four waves of the German Social Survey, I examine whether East–West differences in gender role attitudes are explained by: 1) institutional learning (socialization under a particular regime) or 2) compositional effects (variation in the distribution of causal factors, specifically women's employment or religious affiliation). Analyses suggest that both types of factors influenced East–West differences in gender role attitudes. Even when other characteristics are included in the model, East and West Germans continue to differ in their gender role attitudes. Women's employment and religiosity—both heavily influenced by GDR policies—continue to play a large role in determining gender role attitudes even 15 years after unification. The results suggest that gendered state policies are reflected in citizens' gender role attitudes both directly and through changes in the social characteristics of the population.The early stages of this research were supported in part by the Alexander von Humboldt Bundeskanzler Fellowship Program. I would like to thank Sarah Poggione, Maria Inclan, and Jonah Victor for their assistance in data management and analysis, and Marie Pierson for help in preparation of the final manuscript. I am also grateful to Eric Plutzer, Robert Rohrschneider, and the reviewers and editors of Politics & Gender for their suggestions and comments.

Street harassment is a form of sexual terrorism that reminds women of their vulnerability to violent assault in public and semipublic spaces. Black women's experiences of street harassment are complicated by their race, and by the race of their harasser(s). Black feminists' political vocabulary of intersectional analysis offers a useful framework for portraying the indivisibility of race and gender in black women's lives, but the extension of intersectional criticism to capture black lesbians' political vulnerability within black politics and civic life has been neither automatic nor consistent in black feminist theory. This article invokes the 2003 street harassment and subsequent murder of a black lesbian teenager by a black male assailant in Newark, NJ, both to demonstrate black heterosexual women's interest convergence with black lesbians in black civic life, and to urge black feminists to be less equivocal in holding black men and women responsible for their participation in black patriarchy. This requires the retrieval and redefinition of the political language of culture and behavior from black conservatives who rightly flag the associational aspects of black politics, but who fail to question the gender and sexuality dynamics within these associations and fail to perceive the interplay between civic behavior and intersecting structural inequalities, such as racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and spatial poverty.I wish to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers of Politics & Gender for their helpful critical feedback. Thanks also to the participants in the Philadelphia Political Theory Workshop, held at the University of Pennsylvania (September 2005), and to Temple University's Conference on Black Civil Society in American Life (September 2005) where I presented an earlier version of this article, as well as to Reuel Rogers and my research assistant Greg Graham.

Many feminist theorists have embraced coalition building as the central model for feminist political mobilization. They have done so because they believe that coalitional solidarity resolves a long-standing impasse within feminism between the political claims of diversity among women and the political need for unity. In this essay, I argue that the turn to coalition politics within feminist theory is problematic: While coalitional solidarity honors the claims of diversity among women, it ignores the importance of acknowledging commonality. The tactical ties that it encompasses fail to enact the kind of mutual recognition on which feminism, as a movement for social justice, depends. I show that in order to address both the concern with diversity and the need for unity in a satisfying way, theorists of solidarity must supplement their appeal to coalition building with an account of the ethical and affective preconditions of inclusive political ties. Specifically, I argue that the cultivation of “enlarged sympathy” among feminist political actors is crucial to the establishment of political bonds that accommodate and affirm important differences among women.The author would like to thank the following individuals for helpful comments and discussions: Farid Abdel-Nour, Cheryl Hall, Kimberly Lau, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, and the editors and anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper in San Francisco at the American Political Science Association's annual meeting in 2001.

In the previous issue, scholars Jane Mansbridge, Mark P. Jones, and Miki Caul Kittilson addressed a series of questions about gender quota laws. Are quotas a good idea? Should more countries adopt them? Should the United States consider them? In this issue, three additional scholars weigh in. Lisa Baldez considers the pros and cons of gender quota laws on the basis of research she has done on the adoption and implementation of a gender quota law in Mexico. Mona Lena Krook maintains that the adoption of gender quota laws often reveals the deep-rooted nature of gender discrimination in existing processes of candidate recruitment. Finally, Medha Nanivadekar reflects on the lessons that can be drawn about gender quota laws from the example of the reserved seats for women in India, a measure that “created 1 million slots for women.”

What country currently boasts the highest percentage of women in parliamentary office? If you ask most people, they will guess one of the Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, or Denmark. These guesses are close in one sense but very far off in another. The answer is Rwanda. As of this writing, women make up nearly half of the members of the Rwandan Chamber of Deputies—48.8% according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (2005b). Most people find this answer surprising. Sadly, we tend to associate Rwanda with the genocide of 1994 rather than with gender equality. What has put Rwanda in the number one spot on the list of women in elective office, an important indicator of women's equality?

Gender quotas have become an increasingly prominent solution in recent years to the underrepresentation of women in electoral politics. As research on these policies has grown, scholars have primarily sought to explain how and why quotas are adopted and, more recently, why some quota policies are more effective than others in facilitating women's access to political office. Most studies, however, also consider—often in a less systematic fashion—the normative aspects of quota reform, usually by detailing the various objections leveled against gender quotas and their impact on efforts to adopt and implement quota measures. Integrating insights from a wide range of case studies, I outline these arguments but note that quotas also generate a host of positive implications that remain largely undertheorized in this literature. I observe, further, that more and more countries are adopting gender quotas despite these well-versed normative objections. These developments indicate greater scope for political initiatives to increase women's representation—despite assumed social and economic “prerequisites” for change—and, indeed, signal a broader shift in international norms in support of projects to promote gender-balanced decision making. One of the few countries seemingly unaffected by these global trends is the United States, where proposals for gender quotas have simply not entered into the realm of public debate. After offering several possible explanations for this state of affairs, I draw on this case to emphasize the pivotal role of politics in opening and closing opportunities to pursue gender quotas, as well as to point to a new set of questions for future research.

The most important feature of a quota system is that it ensures representation of the target group in a much more definitive manner than does any other method. Quotas are a form of compensation for historical injustice suffered by identifiable groups and represent evidence of society's commitment to redress that injustice. Quotas offer greater legitimacy to a political system by ensuring greater representation and by integrating marginalized groups into the mainstream. Utilitarian justifications of quotas focus on the advantages of greater representation of all sections of society as a means of facilitating their contribution to the society. Quotas indicate that underrepresentation of marginal groups is not a statement of the groups' poor performance but of the system's poor performance at creating a level playing field.

Women and Politics in Chile. By Susan Franceschet. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2005. 203 pp. $49.95.

This is a well-researched, well-written, and conceptually precise contribution to a thick field of books on the topic of women and politics in Chile. Susan Franceschet frames her book as an analysis of gendered citizenship in Chile from the 1930s to the present. In the individual chapters, she employs concepts and theories drawn from literature on social movements and women and the state. Specifically, she addresses four main areas of debate in the field of women and politics: the employment of a “politics of difference” as a movement frame, the tensions between “autonomous” or “double militant” activist positions, the factors that impede or facilitate women's access to electoral politics, and relations between women and women's state machineries.

The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence. Edited by Beverly Baines and Ruth Rubio-Marin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 342 pp. $34.99. Paperback.

Beverly Baines and Ruth Rubio-Marin have gathered together a group of lawyers, mostly law faculty, with expertise in constitutional law, women's rights, civil and human rights, and gender equality. The result is an edited collection on constitutional sex equality litigation, with chapters covering a wide array of issues, including reproductive rights, employment discrimination, sexual harassment, family law, pornography, social welfare policy, and voting rights. By using gender as a “focal point” (p. 1) of constitutional jurisprudence, the authors assess the success of a feminist constitutional agenda.

Women, Partisanship, and the Congress. By Jocelyn Jones Evans. New York: Palgrave Macmillian. 2005. 161 pp. $65.00.

In Women, Partisanship, and the Congress, Jocelyn Jones Evans brings a fresh perspective to the women officeholder literature. Rather than emphasizing gendered impact on policy and political outcomes, she focuses on elements of the institutional impact on women's professional opportunities. The primary question underlying her analysis is not “What difference do women make?” but “What opportunities do they have for career advancement given the cultures of the two major parties?” In this, the central premise of the book fits within recent scholarly inquiry into the effects of gendered institutions on the experiences and impact of women officeholders. Further, her work serves as a reminder that scholars have not placed sufficient emphasis on female legislators' ability to achieve career success—and that success possibilities differ in each of the two major parties.

The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean States. By Anna M. Agathangelou. New York and Houndmills Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 214 pp. $59.95.

This ambitious book attempts to map out a materialist theory of the global political economy of sex. It looks at one neglected aspect of the reproductive economy—the role played by migrant women in the provision of domestic and sexual labor—what Anna Agathangelou calls the “global political economy of desire.” She uses as her case studies three “peripheral economies” in the Eastern Mediterranean: Cyprus, Greece, and Turkey. She examines the roles played by two different groups of women in the construction of these processes. She looks first at the “white but not quite” women from East Central Europe and the ex-Soviet Union who have often been trafficked and now work as hostesses, prostitutes, and other kinds of sex workers in bars, clubs, and casinos. She also examines the roles of “black” women workers who come, for example, from the Philippines and Sri Lanka. It is these women who predominate among domestic servants and who often work long hours under appalling conditions to service the demands of their employers. Agathangelou therefore explores the workings of the racialized hierarchies within these groups of workers in terms of the ways in which they are seen by the local population and the discourses employed to describe them.

List of contributors.