I offer a reading Sara Ruddick's account of feminist solidarity as grounded in her reconceptualization of “work” in order to suggest that she provides a framework for transnational feminist solidarity that offers an important augmentation to other contemporary theories of transnational feminist solidarity. Feminist solidarity, according to Ruddick, forms through struggles to work. But what she means by work has not been fully appreciated in the literature on Ruddick. Scholars who focus solely on maternal thinking or even the work of mothering obscure the fact that such work is just her prime example of the reconceptualized notion of work she develops. I unpack her notion of work and show how it functions in a theoretical account of transnational feminist solidarity and feminist resistance movements.

Given that most national executives have been men, it is a commonplace to observe that access to executive power is gendered. Men have historically served as heads of government, and few women have been presidents or prime ministers. Women's numbers are increasing, however, as is research focusing on women who have achieved national executive leadership (e.g., Jalalzai 2013; Murray 2010). Such research has emphasized women's individual resources and credentials, family background, and political experience as factors contributing to their political success; research focusing on the strategic and institutional structural factors that contribute to this success has been rare.

In 1951, when Jean Elshtain was ten, she contracted polio. In the small Colorado town where she grew up (then as now, the population was under 200), the medical system did not understand well how to deal with polio. Her doctors sent her to a hospital, separated her from her parents, withdrew fluid from her spinal cord without anesthetic, and, for fear of contagion, sequestered her in a single room where even the nurse feared contact. Elshtain said later, “The only person I saw during that time was a nurse who [would] … put a meal down and leave a bedpan.” After the nurse hurriedly left the room, this ten-year old girl faced the walls and her condition by herself.

The Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, henceforth AKP) came to power in 2002 with the promise of consolidating democracy and strengthening civil society to further Turkey's bid to join the European Union (EU). To this end, in its first term in the parliament (2002–2007), the AKP implemented a set of political reforms that lifted the restrictions on political and civil rights such as the freedom of assembly, associations, and expression and improved the rule of law (Kubicek 2005; Müftüler-Baç 2005). The AKP, as it has promised in its election campaigns, also engaged civil society into policy-making processes. In the initial years of the AKP, diverse civil society actors gathered on broad civil society platforms and worked with the AKP government to consolidate Turkish democracy (Keyman 2010; Kubicek 2005). Although the Islamist segments of civil society began to integrate into the secular political sphere and to voice their demands more freely, Islamist women's civil society organizations (CSOs) have not fully benefited from this transforming political atmosphere under the AKP.

Twenty years ago, Pippa Norris and Joni Lovenduski published the classic work Political Recruitment: Gender, Race and Class in the British Parliament (1995), one of the most comprehensive accounts of legislative recruitment thus far. Seeking to explain the social bias evident in legislatures worldwide, Norris and Lovenduski focused on the central role of political parties, arguing that the outcome of parties’ selection processes could be understood in terms of the interaction between the supply of candidates wishing to stand for office and the demands of party gatekeepers who select the candidates. Indeed, in most countries, political parties control not only which candidates are recruited and selected, but also are the central actors involved in adopting and implementing candidate selection reforms such as gender quotas. Yet, two decades later, systematic studies of the “secret garden” of candidate selection and recruitment have been few and far between in the gender and politics literature. It therefore seems a particularly appropriate time to revisit the core preoccupations, puzzles, and challenges that remain in the field of gender and political recruitment.

I have long been a puzzled admirer of Jean Elshtain's work, going back to graduate school when Public Man, Private Woman (Elshtain 1981) first came out, and I read it for a class in feminist theory taught by Nancy Hartsock. I remember another student, a Marxist, wrinkling her nose and saying about the author, “she's really pretty conservative, don't you think?” I had a hard time understanding this question. As a newcomer to feminism in the early 1980s, I perhaps naively thought that anyone who recognized that gender was an important category for political analysis, that it was a realm of inequality, and that canonical political theory actually had a lot to say about it despite the fact that most of our professors always blithely ignored it, was, by definition, pretty radical.

In convergence with the global norm toward more proportional representative electoral systems, many countries in East Asia have adopted quota strategies to address women's political underrepresentation (Franceschet, Krook, and Piscopo 2012; Krook 2009). Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Japan provide ideal case studies to investigate the impact of these efforts. While these countries share similar economic development, educational levels, and Confucian communitarian ethos, their experiences and progress on empowering women vary. For example, the level of women's legislative representation in the region ranges from a low of 8.1% in Japan to a high of 33.6% in Taiwan. And while Taiwan and South Korea embarked on constitutional reforms in the 1990s and introduced candidate quotas or reserved seats to guarantee women's legislative representation at all levels, Singapore and Japan have resisted legislating quotas but instead set 30% women parliamentarians as targets of party strategies. This collection of papers explores this intraregional variation with a comparative view on the origins and impact of quotas on women's political life. Specifically, we trace the origins of quota adoption and how they interact with the existing electoral and party institutions to improve women's legislative numbers.

The essays here reflect on the need to rebuild bridges between two key strands of feminist International Relations (IR) scholarship: feminist security studies (FSS) and feminist (international) political economy (FPE/FIPE). As many of the contributions to this section point out, feminist IR scholarship has long emphasized how gender relations and identities are constituted globally in relation to processes of militarization, securitization, globalization, and governance. In more recent years, however, feminist IR scholarship has come to be dominated by a concern with security (Prügl 2011). Of course, FPE scholarship has continued to provide critical accounts of the gendered nature of global production, work, and financial crises (among other issues). But it is notable that, in doing so, much FPE scholarship has tended to avoid questions of security and/or violence. This CP section, then, looks to the growing divide between FSS and FPE with all of the contributors seeking to analyse how these two traditions of feminist scholarship might be reintegrated and why this reintegration is important.

Jean Elshtain, in an essay published in Signs in 1982 and entitled “Feminist Discourse and Its Discontents: Language, Power, and Meaning,” addressed one of the many issues with which feminist theorists were then grappling: the oppressive power of language as a tool of control over those who had been silenced throughout history, leaving those wanting to resist that control with the task of discovering new modes of communication. Acknowledging that language has the potential to oppress, Elshtain was, however, not ready to abandon the past, to urge her readers to imagine a world where one could escape the languages and discourses that were bequeathed to us over the generations.

In Gender and International Security: Feminist Perspectives on Achieving Global Security, J. Ann Tickner (1992) identified three main dimensions to “achieving global security”—national security, economic security, and ecological security: conflict, economics, and the environment. Much of the work in feminist peace studies that inspired early feminist International Relations (IR) work (e.g., Brock-Utne 1989; Reardon 1985) and many of Tickner's contemporaries (e.g., Enloe 1989; Peterson and Runyan 1991; Pettman 1996) also saw political economy and a feminist conception of security as intrinsically interlinked. Yet, as feminist IR research evolved in the early 21st century, more scholars were thinking either about political economy or about war and political violence, but not both.

In 2003, Japan's dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) committed to the goal of 30% female representation in management and political positions by 2020 to conform with the international norm to promote women's leadership. This nonbinding commitment received widespread media attention. In 2012, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe reemphasized this goal before the lower house election. Yet, in his first cabinet, Abe appointed only two women. Moreover, in the 2013 upper house election, the LDP fielded only 9 women out of 79 candidates, nowhere near the 30% candidate goal (Torres 2013). In September 2014, Abe appointed five new women in his cabinet reshuffle, two of whom were forced to resign a month later due to scandals. Four women currently sit on the cabinet due to one female replacement (Flackler 2014). Despite Abe's attempts to increase women in his cabinet, most agree that Japan is not on target to meet the 30% benchmark (Gender Equality Bureau 2012).

Candidate selection and recruitment has been notably described as the “secret garden” of politics—an obscure process, often hidden from view, that is regulated largely by internal party rules, informal practices, and power relationships (cf. Gallagher and Marsh 1988). In this contribution, we contend that informal party practices and their gendered consequences are critically important for understanding the continuity of male political dominance and female underrepresentation. Rather than make a strict separation between formal and informal rules in the recruitment process, we argue that gender politics scholars must instead identify and empirically investigate the specific combinations of such rules that impact upon women's and men's political participation in parties. The proposed approach allows for a more nuanced understanding of the bounded nature and variable outcomes of institutional innovation and party change.

Is women's chronic minority status worldwide explained by a lack of women wishing to stand for political office or by party selectors’ disinterest in selecting women candidates? This debate continues among gender politics scholars; however, an increasing number of studies highlight the need to further investigate how the demands of party selectors might shape the supply of women candidates, especially in strong parliamentary democracies where political parties are the key gatekeepers (Kenny 2013; Murray 2010). This concern was already present in Norris and Lovenduski's (1995) original model, which called for a deeper examination of the “interaction effects” between “supply” and “demand.” In engaging with this call, I argue that the constraining effects of supply are reinforced not only by the demands of party selectors, but also by the everyday (gendered) functioning of political parties, which helps us understand the differential chances of women and men eventually becoming candidates.

Gender and politics scholars have demonstrated that the women's movement plays a pivotal role in the adoption of gender quotas and in improving women's political representation (Bauer and Britton 2006; Dahlerup 2006; Krook 2009). They typically argue that domestic political transformations and international pressure help to mobilize the women's movement and demands for more women in elected offices (Huang, this volume; Krook, O'Brian, and Swip 2010). The South Korean case affirms these studies, as women's organizations often take advantage of the local political transformations to push for the gender quota adoption. However, we contend that without political parties' full commitment to implementing gender quotas and supplementing quotas with non-quota measures, efforts that prioritize the descriptive representation of women and formal quota legislation have brought only limited effects on enhancing women's political representation.

Jean Elshtain's writings on feminism, families, and politics were both profoundly important to the development of feminist theory and, at times, deeply puzzling. Elshtain engaged with central texts of western political thought in ways that enabled and encouraged others to think through what it would mean to take women's lives seriously in all their ambiguity and complexity.

While feminists usually try to ground the meanings that they study, theorizing the mundane or the everyday may very well represent a detour—or even a dead end—if bread-and-butter issues related to the security and economic well-being of ordinary women and men are ignored. What value does feminist theorizing (even if it draws from women's lived experiences) have in war-affected contexts where meeting immediate needs is paramount? At what point does the theorizing of the body under such circumstances become a means to satisfying intellectual fetishes? Theorizing the everyday is messy because it has to contend with the immediate social setting in which popular culture is inseparable from the economic materiality of the conditions of oppression.

Invite a woman to run for office. Based on findings that women are most responsive to and reliant on encouragement in making the decision to run for office, this invitation refrain is pervasive among those seeking greater gender parity in U.S. politics. For example, in 2007, the Women's Campaign Fund launched She Should Run, complete with an online tool that, to date, has been used to ask just under 200,000 women to run for office. In 2014, another organization, Vote Run Lead, adopted a similar strategy, launching Invitation Nation to send e-invitations to run to nearly 10,000 women within their first year of launching the project. My own organization, the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), has “invited” countless women to run for office through online communications, training programs, and recruitment campaigns and initiatives. While each of these organizations has also sought to provide potential women candidates with training, information, and resources to assist them throughout the recruitment process, our obsession with inviting can constrain a more complex and comprehensive approach to female candidate recruitment in both research and practice.

Jean Elshtain appeared in my life at a fortuitous moment in the early 1980s as I ventured into unexplored academic terrain—the vexed question of what Hannah Arendt intended by engaging with Christian political thought, particularly the work of the fifth-century bishop and theologian Aurelius Augustine. She was already a notoriously maverick Jewish writer on the Holocaust. What could be made of Arendt's regard for her “old friend” Augustine? A previous discovery—the fact that she had written her dissertation on the theme of love (caritas) as the binding agent in civil society—had led me to the Library of Congress in 1983 where the original 1929 German manuscript is housed, together with the English translation Arendt had begun in New York in 1958. Neither had been published. I proposed a paper on the subject for the APSA meeting in Washington in 1984, fully expecting a negative response, given the deviation from the norm of Arendt scholarship it entailed. Instead I was contacted directly by Elshtain who let me know that she found this new aspect of Arendt's writing very significant and wanted to hear more about it on the Arendt-themed panel that she was organizing and chairing. I knew her work but had never met or corresponded with her. I was, needless to say, surprised and grateful.

Women were severely underrepresented in Singapore's early politics. From 1970 to 1984, not a single female member was found in the Parliament. Unlike the experiences of Taiwan and South Korea in this issue, the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) of Singapore faced no similar pressure from the opposition parties or feminist groups to adopt gender quotas to “fast track” women into politics (Dahlerup and Freidenvall 2005). Yet, the total number of women candidates increased from 0 in 1980 to 32 by 2011. And women's legislative representation reached a high of 23% after the 2011 general election.

A photo depicting Russian President Vladimir Putin in chivalrous fashion, placing his coat around the shoulders of China's first lady at an Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) dinner made headline news around the world in November 2014 (Allen-Ebrahimian 2014). Surely this is not the serious stuff of international politics, IR colleagues commented in social media forums? But from a feminist perspective that pays attention to the pervasive gendering of IR, the image was not at all surprising or trivial. Indeed, the gender symbolism of the image reveals the patriarchal foundations of international politics. Putin, for his part, personifies the linkages between the figure of the male provider—at the heart of global economic governance and meetings like APEC—and the figure of the male protector of “womenandchildren” (Enloe 1993)—at the heart of the security state system.