Gretchen Ritter takes the American Constitution seriously. Like few others, she views the country's fundamental charter as announcing far more than a design for government institutions and a series of individual rights guarantees. The importance of the Constitution, she insists, extends deeper than can be captured by examining the text's most obvious features. It “creates and regulates a social order” (p. 8), a comprehensive understanding of public and private life. “The constitutional order acts as an instrument of social design,” claims Ritter; it endorses certain relationships over others, while also choosing to recognize certain members of the polity as privileged (p. 9). Traditional conceptions of the marital relationship or of the role of particular classes of people in the public realm, for example, are fostered and perpetuated by the constitutional scheme, not because the words of the text necessarily command it but because the nature of a constitution—an instrument that embraces a particular political and social order—makes it so.

Therein lies the problem. Certain groups lack constitutional recognition, and for Ritter that problem is particularly acute when focusing on the plight of women. At the outset, Ritter admits that the book is fundamentally about the relationship of American women to their constitutional order. She notes a profound interest in the intersection between “gender politics” and “constitutional development.” More specifically, the book explores two central questions: first, how “civic membership is gendered, and how the terms of civic membership available to men and women shape their political identities, aspirations, and behavior”; second, how conceptions of civic membership have influenced the American constitutional experiment (p. 3). In short, Ritter is concerned with how the constitutional order is both responsible for, and influenced by, the position of women as less than full members of the American polity. Her general conclusions confirm this interplay.

An important book, The Constitution as Social Design offers a fresh perspective on an old line of inquiry. Much of the material for the author's central argument will be familiar to scholars and students of constitutional law, gender politics, and American political development, and yet Ritter manages to reframe and repackage the evidence to present a powerful case for women to cry foul. The author navigates the well-documented historical landscape of gender politics with profound subtlety, beginning with the early attempts to raise the political status of women during the nineteenth century and, later, through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the involvement of women in various twentieth-century wars, and the debate surrounding the constitutional right of privacy. However, the work is far more than a historical treatise. It is also a volume devoted to identity politics, constitutional jurisprudence, and political theory. In most instances, Ritter seamlessly weaves all of these perspectives into a vivid and coherent image of the struggle for full civic membership.

Ritter is at her best when describing attempts to amend the constitutional text. Her descriptions of the personalities and the policies related to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the failed Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, dovetail nicely with her higher purpose in exploring the themes of constitutional recognition, liberal individualism, and political equality. In general, her discussion about the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments nicely illustrates the perpetual struggle to use constitutional means to alter civic perceptions. Ritter's chief point is that constitutional recognition does not just occur when texts are amended. It takes more than an addition to the constitutional instrument for groups like women to participate as equals in the crafting of the public good. She is also remarkably adept at explaining the importance of the judiciary and the centrality of appellate court decisions in the development of women's constitutional status. The chapters on jury service, labor, equality, and privacy are replete with critical references to cases that have further stifled attempts by women to gain a greater degree of civic power.

This is not to suggest that The Constitution as Social Design is flawless. Perhaps in part because the territory is so well traversed, Chapter 8 on the constitutional right to privacy is comparatively thin. Ritter begins the chapter with a description of the “legal genealogy of privacy” in which she rather quickly arrives at a discussion of the constitutional controversies surrounding contraceptives and abortions. She then goes on to explore the concept of privacy in greater theoretical detail, this time focusing less on decisions involving procreation and termination and more on the equally critical “positions” of “the home,” “the doctor,” and “the decision maker.” Here, she makes an important historical inference: that the dominant paradigm of husband as master over the wife in decisions involving family planning has been replaced in recent years (and as a result of the jurisprudence of privacy) by the equally unsettling paradigm of doctor as master. This is an interesting and critical point that warrants further development.

More problematic is Ritter's final chapter, entitled “The Politics of Presence,” in which she makes a rather unsuccessful attempt to provide some normative relief to readers who are (appropriately) disquieted by her historical and theoretical conclusions. She “proposes an alternative ideal of civic membership” (p. 308) based on the principles of “embodiment” and publicness. That is, she attempts to draw from feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability studies, a conception of civic membership that highlights a woman's physical place in the world, and that uses such physicality to make meaningful inroads into the sphere of full political participation. The result of this discussion is a disjointed conclusion that leaves the reader a bit puzzled; a general problem made more pronounced because it was so unnecessary. Ritter's historical, theoretical, and jurisprudential analysis throughout the book is so compelling that it stands on its own two feet. We can see that something needs to be done to shore up women's civic membership; a short examination of a prescription for change does not add much to that realization.

Yet despite faltering a bit at the end, The Constitution as Social Design represents a significant contribution to the field of American constitutional development. At a meta level it brings to the fore one of the most troubling (and oft-repeated) historical paradoxes: that the American constitutional scheme—still the model for so many constitutional framers around the world—not only permits but also furthers the systematic marginalization of entire populations from participating in the civic discourse. Ritter's scholarship points out that men are still capable of crafting the common good—that is, fully participating as civic members of the polity—whereas women are still seen as connected to the dialogue only in less obvious ways. What is troubling is that America's Constitution is largely to blame.