Over the past 15 years, gender quota debates have emerged in national politics all over the world. More than 40 countries have reformed their constitutions or passed new electoral laws requiring that women comprise certain percentages of aspirants, candidates, or legislative seats, while in many other countries, political parties have adopted quotas on their own. This phenomenon raises both normative and empirical questions, ranging from whether gender quotas are appropriate to why countries adopt them and how effective they have been. Drude Dahlerup's edited book addresses these concerns with the first worldwide compilation of gender quota studies. The editor brings together a diverse group of authors who examine quotas in seven regions of the world, and she brackets their contributions with theoretical chapters on quota adoption and implementation. The result is the most comprehensive resource on gender quotas to date.

Challenging Parties, Changing Parliaments: Women and Elected Office in Contemporary Western Europe. By Miki Caul Kittilson. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. 2006. 190 pp. $64.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.

This is an ambitious book that takes a comprehensive and multimethod approach to understanding the question of women's participation in parliaments. Miki Caul Kittilson proposes a gendered-institutions argument that focuses on political parties as the key mechanism for increases in women's parliamentary representation. She moves away from supply arguments that place the onus on women to run by instead focusing on how parties can be transformed to encourage women to run. She argues that women will be most effective in their efforts to gain a political foothold where they “recognize favorable conditions within the party and party system, and where they devise context-contingent strategies for inclusion” (p. 2).

Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation. By Mary Hawkesworth. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. 2006. 286 pp. $25.95.

In this book, Mary Hawkesworth draws together into an integrated discussion an immense amount of the complex, interdisciplinary research on methods and epistemology accomplished in the past few decades by feminist scholars.

The Gender of Democracy: Citizenship and Gendered Subjectivity. By Maro Pantelidou Maloutas. London and New York: Routledge. 2006. 208 pp. $130.00.

In this theoretically provocative (and action-inspiring) study of the relationship between gender and democracy, Maro Pantelidou Maloutas makes an important contribution to both feminist theory and democratic theory. She emphasizes that democracy's emancipatory potential is substantially inhibited by the existing system of dichotomous gender relations. The requisite for us is to deconstruct rather than simply to modernize gender roles (whether through quotas or parity) which is tantamount to a “modernization of oppression” (p. 55).

Parité! Sexual Equality and the Crisis of French Universalism. By Joan Wallach Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning. 2005. 184 pp. $55.00 cloth, $22.00 paper.

French women were granted full political rights in 1944, yet 50 years later, they accounted for only 6% of the members of the national assembly. In her book, Joan Scott discusses the constitutional reform adopted in 2000 to answer this chronic underrepresentation of women. Rather than engaging philosophical arguments, Scott adopts the perspective of an “historian of the present” (p. ix). She traces the movement for parité from its inception in the late 1980s among feminist groups and European bodies to the adoption of the law, after the movement lost much of its original trenchancy along its transposition into mainstream political discourse.

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.

Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity. By Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler. New York and Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 241 pp. $70.00 cloth, $28.95 paper.

Fortunately, in the last 20 years, the scholarship on women in politics has grown considerably, as have the number of women running for office, the number of women holding office, and thus the amount of data, artifacts, contexts, and situations to be analyzed. Karrin Vasby Anderson and Kristina Horn Sheeler, in Governing Codes, offer a solid, interesting, and insightful addition to this growing line of work. With the presentation of four intriguing case studies, the authors provide a rich and informative analysis from a revealing vantage point—the use of metaphor—to uncover what remains the frustrating and challenging language that four credible and politically astute women had to overcome, as well as some of the rhetorical strategies they successfully employed in doing so.

Just Advocacy? Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation. Edited by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2005. 310 pp. $24.94.

The transnational dimensions of women's rights are an important emerging area of analysis. Just Advocacy? provides timely and critical insights into this area of study. This edited book is unique in that it applies a cultural lens to the study of political questions relating to rights, transnationalism, and representation, questions which are conventionally conceived through legal, institutional, or social movement theories. The critical feminist stance of the authors draws out the complex and often contradictory nature of human rights—especially as they relate to the operation of gender and to women's lives—and conceives of both feminism and transnationalism in diverse ways.

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.”

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.

Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping: A Gendered Analysis. By Sandra Whitworth. Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner. 2004. 225 pp. $49.95.

Armed conflict, torture, murder, sexual assault, sexual enslavement, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS—United Nations peacekeepers are sent into conflict-torn countries to help prevent the further spread of these horrors. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan often highlights these brutalities when he publicly calls upon member states to send troops and resources to protect and assist vulnerable populations in conflict zones. In her most recent book, Men, Militarism & UN Peacekeeping, Sandra Whitworth provides a critical feminist analysis of a UN peacekeeping system that not only is failing to protect civilian populations but is also implicated in the spread of HIV/AIDS and in the torture, murder, sexual assault and enslavement, and human trafficking of the very populations the mission was purportedly sent to assist. Throughout, Whitworth uses sharp critical feminist analyses to help us understand why UN peacekeeping missions have too often become sites of violence and abuse.

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.

Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping. Edited by Dyan Mazurana, Angela Raven-Roberts, and Jane Parpart. Lanham, MD, and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. 2005. 304 pp. $75.00 cloth, $31.95 paper.

Framed in the language of peace (making, keeping, building), the United Nations military interventions of the 1990s have spawned feminist demands for participation, together with critiques of the sexist and gendered practices that have characterized these missions. In Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping, 14 scholar-practitioners relay their observations of the way in which gender politics pervades UN peace missions and postconflict reconstruction.

Healing Identities: Black Feminist Thought and the Politics of Groups. By Cynthia Burack. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2004. 203 pp. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In the introduction to this book, Cynthia Burack articulates her self-identity as multiple and shifting—nonblack, feminist, and interested in working through questions of group identity for personal, political, and intellectual reasons (p. 4). She summarizes the relationship delineated by black feminist theorists themselves regarding group membership and the relative power of the interpreter's voice: “Black feminist theorists are themselves often scholars in the humanities and social sciences. They write of their own struggles…. They do not reject outright the possibility that non-group members can participate in group discourse as readers or interpreters. Rather, they hold that participation confers responsibilities: to listen respectfully to the voices of group members, to claim the grounds and consequences of one's own interests, methods, and perspectives; and to avoid Olympian forms of closure that end intellectual conversation” (p. 4).

Women in the South African Parliament: From Resistance to Governance. By Hannah E. Britton. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2005. 198 pp. $35.00.

The women's movement in America tried but failed to have this language added to the U.S. Constitution: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

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).

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.

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.

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.