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.

Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism. By Jane Duran. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. 308 pp. $64.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Searching for evidence of women's presence in the canon of philosophy, I found that the Cambridge Companion Series, an extensive and prestigious set of 110 volumes offering the “most convenient and accessible guides to the major philosophers available” (from their Website), has only two such volumes devoted to women philosophers. The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt was published in 2000, The Cambridge Companion to Simone de Beauvoir in 2003. Jane Duran, in contrast, has found eight women philosophers to study (seven in addition to Beauvoir), and her book offers a rich introduction to important themes in the work of Hildegard of Bingen, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor Mill, Edith Stein, Simone Weil, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Women's Political Discourse: A 21st Century Perspective. By Molly Mayhead and Brenda Devoe Marshall. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. 2005. 304 pp. $75.00 cloth, $26.00 paper.

Political discourse has proven a worthy source of material for scholarly investigation into power, politics, and policymaking. Policy scholars have frequently used discourse to explore issue framing, media content, and policy decisions (e.g., Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 1993; Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building, 1983; Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox, 1997; Nayda Terkildsen, Frauke I. Schnell, and Cristina Ling, “Interest Groups, the Media, and Policy Debate Formation: An Analysis of Message Structure, Rhetoric, and Source Cues,” Political Communication 15 [1998]: 45–61). As a tool for investigating abortion debates (e.g., Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Jurgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht, Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the U.S., 2002) or sex education (e.g., Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the U.S., 2002), discourse also reveals the gendered dimensions of contemporary American politics. At the same time, this insight is not lost on advocates and opinion leaders: “Words are … bullets” in the culture wars, says James Dobson, founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family (quoted in Irvine 2002, 73).

It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office. By Jennifer L. Lawless and Richard L. Fox. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 203 pp. $65.00 cloth, $22.99 paper.

Why do so few women occupy elected offices in the United States? One reason, perhaps the most important one, is that fewer women than men are politically ambitious. That is the major conclusion to emerge from the innovative research conducted by Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox. This finding alone is bound to make It Takes a Candidate a must-read, must-cite book for all scholars studying gender and politics.

The U.S. Women's Movement in Global Perspective. Edited by Lee Ann Banaszak. Rowman & Littlefield. 2006. 272 pp. $72.00 cloth, $27.95 paper.

Despite its considerable successes, the U.S. women's movement has frequently been seen as a disappointment from a global perspective. For instance, in their analysis of global women's movements' influence on the major multinationals, Robert O'Brien and colleagues state that “in the case of the US women's movement, even though it is the largest and most powerful women's movement in the world, its focus is squarely domestic, not international” (Contesting Global Governance, 2000, p. 53). Similarly, in a chapter in the current volume, Joyce Gelb points out that, although the United States has been a standard-bearer in regard to gender equity policy, a “politics of insularity” has sometimes prevented the movement from achieving new gains (p. 177).

Gender and Social Capital. Edited by Brenda O'Neill and Elisabeth O'Neill Gidengil. New York and London: Routledge. 2006. 425 pp. $90.00 cloth, $29.95 paper.

The essays in this volume constitute a feminist response to Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone, and they shed light on two interrelated questions: First, how is our understanding of the nature and impact of social capital enriched by the introduction of a concern with the consequences of gender differences? Second, how is our understanding of the relationship of gender to politics deepened by an ongoing concern with social capital? As Virginia Sapiro put it (p. 152) in her exceptionally clear theoretical essay: “Wherever discussions of social capital and politics lead, our understanding of the phenomenon will be severely limited if scholars neglect the roles of gender in the creation and distribution of social capital and in the links between social capital and politics. Important aspects of the historically different cultural constructions of male and female in society and politics suggest that disregarding gender in understanding social capital is unwise. Given how different are the structures of women's and men's day-to-day lives and the different types and amounts of financial and social resources to which they have access, a ‘gender-neutral’ story of social capital and politics is likely to be a faulty story.”

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.

Sharing Power: Women, Parliament and Democracy. Edited by Yvonne Galligan and Manon Tremblay. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. 271 pp. $50.00.

This insightful volume contributes to our understanding of women's numerical and substantive representation in national legislatures around the world. Specifically, it focuses on a full array of dimensions of women's political presence: obstacles to women's entrance into parliament, policy mechanisms to improve women's underrepresentation, and the policy impact of growing numbers of women in national politics. Chapter authors draw evidence from a variety of sources—aggregate data on percentages of women in parliament, cabinets and political parties, surveys of political elites and public opinion, and in-depth interviews with party officials.

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.

List of contributors.