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.”

The very diversity of the 13 essays (plus an introduction and conclusion by the editors) that makes them so useful as a collection also renders them difficult to review. With the exception of Sapiro's contribution, all the essays have an empirical base. However, they vary in the kind of evidence they use and in the analytical approach—ranging from case study to multivariate statistical analysis. While most of the authors present data about female and male citizens, Virginia Morrow focuses on early adolescents and Susan Carroll on women state legislators. One of the strengths of the collection is that the evidence is not confined to a single country: Two of the pieces—one by Dietland Stolle and Michele Micheletti and the other by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart—include systematic data from a number of democracies and are genuinely comparative; of the remainder, two are about the United Kingdom, four about the United States, and four about Canada.

Let me mention a couple of the essays that especially added to my understanding of the matters in question. Stolle and Micheletti show that women are more likely than men to take part in a form of civic action that has been overlooked by students of political participation: political consumerism or “buycotting” and boycotting, that is, deliberately buying or not buying products for ethical or political reasons. As a form of collective action, political consumerism is notable both because it is increasing in an era when many democracies have witnessed a decline in some types of political activity and because the usual gender gap in political and civic participation is reversed. Stolle and Micheletti do not shy away from acknowledging the dark potential of political consumerism—for example, consumer boycotts with racist goals. However, I wish they had probed further into the limitations of political consumerism as a form of collective leverage. Targeting government policy is often a sensible strategy with potential for lasting consequences beyond a single company. The American grape boycott of the 1960s is cited as a successful example of political consumerism in which women's participation was crucial. But the authors do not mention that a key reason for some kind of action on behalf of the grape pickers is that agricultural workers did not then—and still do not—fall under the National Labor Relations Act, which protects the right to unionize. Besides, there are times—for example, when a company engaging in objectionable environmental or labor practices sells only to other companies or to governments rather than directly to the public—when political consumerism is simply not a viable tactic.

A particular eye-opener is the essay by Kristin Goss and Theda Skocpol. They document a transformation since the 1960s in the policy concerns of national women's organizations, such that the proportion of these organizations representing women's special concerns (especially on matters of reproductive rights, pro and con) has increased substantially at the expense of the proportion seeking to improve society at large—by, for example, advocating for peace or supporting the public schools. What they describe implies not just a change in organizational goals but a revised definition of what constitutes a “women's issue.” My hunch is that while there may be differences of opinion with respect to whether these processes are to be regretted or welcomed, there will be no controversy over the importance of Goss and Skocpol's findings.

From time to time, some of these essays—I will spare both readers and authors the naming of names—illustrate the tendencies that sometimes emerge in the conduct of feminist scholarship. One issue is that small gender differences are sometimes overinterpreted. That is, when gender differences appear in the data, their small—even statistically insignificant—magnitude may go unnoticed in the focus on patterns of gender distinctiveness. Gender differences are contextual, varying with the domain of human experience. When it comes to social capital and civic engagement in developed democracies, what separates men and women is a gap, not a chasm. A related concern is the relative neglect of the diversity among women (and among men). Women and men in these societies are divided along a variety of dimensions—among them class, race or ethnicity, immigration status, and, especially in Canada, language. I wish that some of the authors had paid more attention to whether the patterns they find obtain, for example, for those at the top and bottom of the social ladder in Britain, for Francophone as well as Anglophone in Canada, for African Americans as well as whites in the United States.

A final point: Had I been editing this collection, I might have suggested that more emphasis be placed on the significant issues of gender and social capital that give the collection its title, and less space and energy devoted to explicit critiques of Putnam. These essays share an admirable willingness not to accept without question traditional masculine ways of doing things. Perhaps feminist scholarship should extend that spirit to the tone of scholarly discourse. Rather than adopting the negative posture so often the norm in academic debate, would it not be distinctively feminist to assume a more constructive approach: recognizing the merits even of flawed work and using them as a point of departure in a process of building?