This special joint podcast from the LSE Review of Books and LSE Equality and Diversity examines the history of the newly acquired Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, through the eyes of a long-term librarian. 

“My movement is the Women’s Movement…”

The Women’s Library @ LSE was recently acquired from the London Metropolitan University and will re-open on August 1st 2013. The collection covers the changing social and political circumstances in the lives of women from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. David Doughan MBE, who has been a librarian at the Women’s Library (formerly the Fawcett Library) for 23 years, speaks to LSE’s Equality and Diversity Adviser, Asiya Islam, about the continued significance of the library and its role in the late 20^th century feminist movement.

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Read the transcript of the interview on the LSE Equality and Diversity blog.

Presented by Amy Mollett. Contributors: Asiya Islam, David Doughan. Produced by Cheryl Brumley. Music courtesy of Duke Hugh (Sweet and Lowdown) from the Freemusicarchive.org.

This book aims to provide a multi-disciplinary, empirical account of pregnant embodiment and how it fits into wider sociological and feminist discourses about gender, bodies, ‘fat’, feminism, and motherhood. The study draws on original qualitative data based on interviews with pregnant women, their partners, and maternity industry professionals. ‘Postmodern’ pregnancy features as an ambivalent and uncertain experience, with women negotiating the boundaries of femininity and motherhood in a socio-political and economic context that both promotes and constrains their ‘choices’. An excellent addition to any feminist’s book shelf, finds Megan O’Branski.

Making Postmodern Mothers: Pregnant Embodiment, Baby Bumps and Body Image. Meredith Nash. Palgrave Macmillan. November 2012.

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The body represents the boundary between the public and the private, and it is a continuously shifting, porous membrane. Our bodies are the means by which we experience the world (to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty), but it is also through our bodies that we may come to harm. We conceptualize our bodies as our own, as private, but there is an undeniably social dimension to our bodies as well that limits the extent to which they are within our control. This precarity becomes much more salient during pregnancy, when a woman’s body begins to occupy more public space as the private space of her own body becomes occupied, and is explored in Meredith Nash’s Making ‘Postmodern’ Mothers.

Part of the Gender and Sexualities in the Social Sciences series, Nash’s book makes an interesting and much-needed contribution to current literature through her exploration of the embodied experience of pregnancy. Using a “feminist phenomenological interviewing style…meaning that the interview is guided by the participant as opposed to the researcher” (p.15), her intention is to read pregnancy as performance, “with the aim of provoking productive tensions within…understandings of western women’s bodies” (p.2). Nash situates her discussion of pregnant embodiment within a postmodernist framework, in order to problematize competing interpretations of the pregnant woman’s body. The majority experience this bifurcation with a sense that “their bodies were out of control” (p.40).

Making ‘Postmodern’ Mothers is divided into seven substantive chapters, organized around Nash’s three intersectional understandings of the pregnant body: “the individual body”, “the social body”, “and the body politic” (p.8), which she understands as the different levels on which the pregnant body is read. The body of a woman in pregnancy becomes a site of multiple, contested, and often competing subjectivities that she must continuously negotiate. In situating her book in the wider literature on pregnancy and the pregnant body, Nash finds existing research into pregnancy and the pregnant body to be “contradictory, particularly with regard to how pregnant women cope with weight gain” (p.35). Previous accounts, she argues, “have largely failed to account for women’s pre-pregnancy body image(s), which I argue are essential in understanding why women fear gaining weight in pregnancy” (p.40). This theme of preoccupation with the physical boundaries of the body continues throughout the book, and is the backbone of the majority of Nash’s contentions.

Repeatedly, Nash finds that there is an increased and unyielding awareness of the size of the pregnant woman’s body. This awareness most often carries a negative connotation for the woman herself, irrespective of how her pregnant body may be perceived by, for instance, her partner or her family. Throughout Nash’s study, it appears that pregnant women are no more exempt from the normative constraints of the bio-political than women who are not. In her fourth chapter, Nash explores the experience of “showing”, at which point many of Nash’s interviewees expressed feelings of relief at appearing pregnant, rather “than just chubby” (p.62). Yet although these women now had a readily legible reason for their larger bodies, Nash reports that the presence of the baby bump “was psychologically uncomfortable, but also familiar to women used to monitoring their bellies” (p.65), and that “[w]omen reported feeling anxious that their pregnant bodies could be ‘mistaken’ for ‘fat’” (p.69).

In her fifth chapter, Nash begins to examine the day-to-day management of pregnancy and the pregnant body, and she opens this exploration by focusing upon dress and maternity fashion. This particular empirical chapter has been chosen for this review because of what it reveals about the productive nature of pregnancy, i.e. that women are both “’producers’ and ‘consumers’ of popular discursive representations of pregnancy” (p.13), and because the dress and display of the pregnant body is located within a complex web of subject positions that arguably go unnoticed by a majority of people who are not and have not been pregnant. In interviewing pregnant women in search of maternity clothing, as well as designers producing and distributing maternity wear, Nash highlights the pregnant body as spectacle, and as wedged between two uncomfortable norms of femininity as simultaneously desexualized and an object of desire. That women who are visibly pregnant should be in any way desexualized is, as Nash points out, very strange, as surely pregnancy is a quite visible expression of sexuality, yet Nash reveals that maternity fashion persistently refers to its consumers as “girls”, which she suggests in an uncomfortable legacy of second-wave feminism.

Even as pregnant women are discursively de-sexed, they are still expected to remain objects of sexual desire, which is the impetus behind the somewhat distressing expectation of the “yummy mummy”. While being discursively desexualized as “girls”, pregnant women are at the same time offered an array of maternity fashions that are “’sexy’, ‘fun’ and ‘glamorous’ clothing for the mother-to-be” (p.86), all the while insisting (occasionally quite literally through printed slogans and phrases) that the women who wear such clothes are certainly not fat, but expecting (p.89). These glamorous maternity fashions required that the women who wore them be comfortable with or at least permissive of exposing their pregnant bodies in public space, as many of the women interviewed complained of their being excessively tight or low-cut. Through her discussion of maternity fashion, Nash reveals that “pregnant women are not only enticed to preserve their ‘girlishness’, they are encouraged to maintain bodies that are thin, proudly displayed and in control” (p.127).

What makes this book so compelling is the clarity with which Nash brings to light the tensions within not only the embodiment of pregnancy but the embodiment of femininity more broadly. That the body is always a constellation of competing and concentric identities is what makes political embodiment such a fascinating field, but for this reason it is also often a nebulous one. In this piece, Nash is able to peel apart these layers enough to shed light on the bifurcated and overlapping experiences of pregnancy as simultaneously private/public, Self/Other, thin/large. This book would be an excellent choice not only for those interested in exploring the embodied experience of pregnancy, but is also more broadly for anyone interested in questions of feminism and the embodied experience of women.

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Megan O’Branski is a third year PhD candidate in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University. She received her BA in Political Science from the University of Connecticut in 2009. Her research focuses on the intersection of performativity, gender, and the weaponization and brutalization of the body in ethnic violence. Further research interests include sexuality, security studies, and zombies. Read more reviews by Megan.

In The Subject of Murder, Lisa Downing explores the ways in which the figure of the murderer has been made to signify a specific kind of social subject in Western modernity. Drawing on the work of Foucault in her studies of the lives and crimes of killers in Europe and the United States, Downing interrogates the meanings of media and texts produced about and by murderers. Emma Smith finds an eloquently presented and well-researched range of case studies, charting the crimes, treatment of, and public responses to several murderers throughout history.

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer. Lisa Downing. University of Chicago Press. April 2013.

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In her latest text, Lisa Downing sets out to bring our perception of the murderer into critical focus. Observing that murderers are overwhelmingly depicted as exceptional, or otherwise differentiated from normative society, Downing attempts to overturn the popular (mis?)conceptions of murderers as beasts; ‘others’ who can be separated, morally and emotionally from mainstream society, or conversely, individuals, not greatly unalike the society whose values they have seemingly transgressed. This dichotomy is explored in some detail, through extensive case studies encompassing key 19th-20th century murderers, and results in a fundamental, academic challenge to current thought on murderers.

Few female killers have been associated with as much monstrosity and notoriety as Myra Hindley; the subject of one of Downing’s most extensive case studies. In keeping with the overall aim, Downing interrogates the notion of exceptionality, examining the aspects of Hindley’s police investigations, imprisonment, and her portrayal in media and other cultural forms that were pertinent in the often subjective reading and cultivation of Hindley’s public identity. Gender (and to a lesser extent, class) is a focus in this attempt by the author to understand and facilitate a possible re-conceptualisation of the identity ascribed to Hindley.

Downing first examines how Hindley and her partner Ian Brady were subject to unequal questioning and treatment. Hindley, unlike Brady, was made to provide an extensive explanation of her attitudes towards children; a justification, not only for her tolerance of violence and cruelty towards children, but perhaps more crucially for her apparent lack of maternal instinct. Similarly, Hindley’s motives were questioned, on account of her dissidence from the societal (female) ideals of marriage and raising a family. Hindley’s non-traditional upbringing is also shown to have been a subject of focus; her failure to live with and be brought up by her mother deemed suspicious. By comparison, Brady’s failure to marry and raise a family was rarely interrogated to the same degree. Unrelated, but also suggestive of the degree to which Hindley was a product of her society, is the focus drawn towards Hindley’s physical appearance, often considered transgressive and out of the ordinary compared to contemporary feminine beauty ideals.

Downing’s nuanced reading of Hindley’s profile reveals much more than the nature of Hindley’s crimes and the resulting impact on creating the ‘other’. Rather, Downing invites the reader to consider in more detail why Hindley was/is so exceptional. Deconstructing the various elements that led to and underpinned the ‘otherness’ image of Hindley, Downing indicates that Hindley, unlike her male counterpart, was doubly transgressive: Hindley not only deviates from the moral and legal codes that are adhered to by most in society, but crucially, from her preconditioned, social, gendered role of a woman. Hindley was judged on her rejection of the feminine ideals of maternity, child rearing and its associated qualities of care and compassion, suggesting that Hindley’s identity as murderer may have been as much a product of the world she was socialised into, as a source of rejection by that world.

Downing draws attention to another contentious case area in her chapter on child murder, involving children themselves as the perpetrators. Analysis primarily focuses on Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, killers in the James Bulger murder case, and the Columbine High School killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. In attempting to understand children who kill, Downing identifies several difficulties largely related to changing conceptualisations of childhood over time, which have seen children now viewed as those who must be subject to some degree of surveillance. In this context, Downing examines the influence of such conceptualisations, and the resulting potential for us to question and even fear the concept of childhood; in the wake of the Bulger murder in particular, fears amassed as to the idea that childhood may actually be more violent, or prone to evil than once thought. Bulger’s killers thus came to signify a monstrous opposite to that of the innocent child ideal represented by Bulger, and invoked in parents a fear that their own child could be harboring similar, murderous tendencies, or in the case of Harris and Klebold, that other innocent children could be exposed and affected by the violence and cruelty of a minority of children.

Like the case of Hindley, various cultural and environmental factors were examined in attempting to better understand the motives of Venables and Thompson; the boys’ socio-economic position was considered, amongst other factors, with an overarching tendency to draw upon the maternal parenting of the boys. Downing notes that there is overwhelmingly a cultural tendency to attribute women’s sexuality to men’s (sex-based) killings. According to this model, a dominant mother and absent or passive father – as both Venables and Thompson had – represents inappropriate feminine behaviour and may be a factor in their child’s subsequent delinquency. Implicitly, this seems to suggest the prevalence of fear surrounding the disintegration of the nuclear family, and a lack of passivity/normativity in women. Downing builds on these ideas in order to develop our understanding of children who kill, arguing that the child killer, as with the female killer, is very much a phenomenon in our society. By means of comparison, Downing considers the terms used to describe the activities of male killers; ‘randomness’ and ‘motionless’ (p. 192) being two examples, terms rarely used for females or children who kill, highlighting the degree to which the latter groups are distinguished from male killers, with children typically viewed as deviating from the ideology of the innocent child and the ideals of their environment. This would suggest the exceptionality ascribed to child killers, as with female killers. As Downing argues however, perhaps child killers are less exceptional than previously thought; sharing a sense of oppression with women, child killers may similarly be considered a product of their society, their position and identity vilified and made exceptional by their apparent failure, or lack of willingness to conform to their expected social roles and behaviour as dictated by societal norms.

Downing eloquently presents a well-researched range of case studies, charting the crimes, treatment of, and public responses to several murderers throughout history. Downing also makes a substantial literary contribution in that she invites us to consider a new means of conceptualising the figure of the murderer. Suggesting that killers may not in fact constitute such exceptional ‘others’ and may conversely be considered to be shaped by – and thereby be – products of their society, Downing makes some significant and original observations. For this reason, Downing’s text is highly recommended.

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Emma Smith is a PhD student within the Department of Applied Social Science at the University of Stirling. Her PhD explores victim and statutory/voluntary agency responses to violence against sex workers. Other research interests include: health, policing, equality, sociology and research methods, particularly qualitative based methods. She has a MA Hons in History and Sociology from the University of Glasgow, a PGDip in Social Research from Glasgow Caledonian University, and an MSc in Applied Social Research from the University of Stirling. Read more reviews by Emma.

Best known as the author of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir also wrote an array of other political and philosophical texts that are less well known. Together, these constitute an original contribution to political theory and philosophy, and this book aims to locate Beauvoir in her own intellectual and political context and demonstrate her continuing significance. Reviewed by Emily Coolidge Toker.

Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity. Sonia Kruks. Oxford University Press. December 2012.

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Sonia Kruks’ Simone de Beauvoir and the Politics of Ambiguity is a comprehensive, holistic treatment of Beauvoir’s contributions to political thinking, drawn both from the full breadth of her written corpus and from her lived experiences during and following the German occupation of Paris.  Although a great deal of attention is given to The Second Sex, Kruks is equally nimble when incorporating Beauvoir’s lesser-known work, in particular her work on the elderly and her forays into fiction – a breadth of source material which greatly strengthens her contribution to the question at hand: the nature and possibilities of political agency.

Beauvoir’s The Second Sex is still very much present in the feminist movement. Most familiar is the opening line, “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman,” with which Beauvoir seriously jarred the long-standing equation of sex and gender. The latter came to be understood as a complex social construct  – albeit one in which most women were fully complicit, and one which had to be internalized to be effective – while the former remained bound to the physical materiality of the body. This distinction, between the material body and the socially-influenced ‘psyche’ (for lack of a better word), and its implications, is at the heart of feminist thought. But that’s not new. What’s new here is the idea that this relationship between our physicality and the whole of ourselves as ‘essence made body’ could offer novel insights into the sphere of political action and individuals as political actors.

And this is Kruks’s primary intention: to make the general public aware of the breadth and relevance of Beauvoir’s “profoundly original and significant” contribution to political thinking (p.3). The ambiguity  referred to in the title here is crucial, used throughout the book to bring attention to the “paradoxes and necessary failures of action” in which it results. As such, the word’s original meaning – the ability of something to be interpreted in two or more equally reasonable ways – bears repeating: in Beauvoir’s understanding, this idea is applied both to an action, which can have, presumably, as many legitimate ‘meanings’ as there are people to interpret it, and to the basal condition of human existence as both a physical body (acted upon, subject to, and moulded by social conditions) and the more difficult-to-pinpoint ‘mind’, which is tied to (but not necessarily contained within) the body.

Ambiguity, Kruks is careful to point out, is not necessarily a strict negative indicative of fault; rather, it is to be seen as a “quality of phenomena themselves, signifying their indeterminacy” and, most importantly for Beauvoir, is used “to denote relationships in which antithetical qualities coexist in agonistic tension” (p.6-7). The ambiguity most particularly relevant in political action and thought is, in Beauvoir’s words, “the strange ambiguity of existence made body” (p.7), which becomes manifest in the vaporous but undeniable boundaries between self and society, and the various means by which a self and its actions acquire meaning.

This ambiguity is irresolvable for the very simple reason that we are not the sovereign, autonomous consciousnesses theorized by Enlightenment-era humanists; as such, the first and most profound point on which Beauvoir (through Kruks) insists, is that we come to terms with the ambiguities and tensions intrinsic to all action (and inaction).  It is towards this end that Kruks mines Beauvoir’s work for examples of how these ambiguities play out and what meaning they acquire in the political realm.

Let’s look at a specific political action: suffragette Emily Davison throws herself under King George V’s horse in 1913. This action could be legitimately interpreted as one of rebellion, defiance, accidental death, terrorism, suicide, martyrdom, and no doubt arguments could be made for any number of other interpretations. Anyone familiar with G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy has heard the argument for suicide and martyrdom being as polar opposites, and that two such radically different interpretations are readily applicable to Emily Davison’s political action is a strong indication that Beauvoir’s insistence on the inevitability of failure is not uncalled for. Add consideration of Ms. Davison’s intentions and the muddled soup of personal and collective concerns to the variety of possible interpretations and the ambiguity becomes increasingly multifaceted, and clearly a necessary aspect of any action.

This does not make Beauvoir a feather in the cap of hard-core relativists, by any stretch. Rather, despite her scorn for “intransigent moralists” and “moral purists,” Beauvoir considers political “realists” to be an equally shady example of “bad faith” – of wilful ignorance or self-deception, in this case of too readily accepting and absolving themselves of the consequences of a “realistic” lesser evil. Kruks writes: “this does not mean that action should not be guided by values. That existence is ambiguous does not mean that it is absurd or meaningless but rather that ‘its meaning is never fixed, that it must be unceasingly won’. Thus, values must function as heuristics, as guidelines […] rather than as commands to be followed blindly” (p.42). Beauvoir offers freedom as guidance for action, albeit one that neither dictates action (or inaction) nor “justif[ies] the injuries that a politics oriented towards expanding freedom may produce” (ibid).

While the reader may, at this point, be understandably frustrated, a thread running throughout the book provides an important indicator of the quality of this ‘freedom’. This recurring theme is that of mutual recognition between individuals of others’ embodied subjectivity, and can be followed through her analysis of Beauvoir’s discussions of modes of dehumanization and oppression in the second chapter (“Theorizing Oppression”), through the difficult acknowledgment of “the impossibility of eliminating alterity and objectification from human relations” even when one is, in good faith, doing one’s best to fulfil the obligation to struggle against oppressive/dehumanizing practices (discussed most explicitly in the third chapter, “Confronting Privilege”).

This thread re-emerges in the fourth chapter, “Dilemmas of Political Judgement,” as Kruks, through Beauvoir, explores the implications of viewing judgments as “acts of situated freedom” which “must exceed the application of principle” (p.125). She does so primarily through Henri Perron: the founder and editor of a left-leaning independent newspaper in Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins who finds himself, after the war, facing a series of difficult decisions with regard to his own future and the future of his newspaper. Caught between his desire to isolate himself from politics and resume his successful writing career (to become “the old Henri”, a desire he ultimately realizes is impossible: the “old Henri” no longer exists), and his personal loyalty to his mentor and his broader loyalty to the Resistance, the judgements and decisions he makes are informed by a very messy combination of emotions (tied both to personal hopes and ideals, and to interpersonal relationships) and emotionless practical “reasoning.”

In the last chapter, “’An Eye for an Eye’: The Question of Revenge”, Kruks uses Beauvoir’s discussion of three different types of revenge – the desire for revenge on one’s own behalf; on behalf of others; and in the context of legal prosecution – to tease out the relationships between the subjectivities involved, with the ultimate assertion that revenge always “fails to accomplish much of what is desired” (p.161).

The book itself is organized very much with the student in mind, with each chapter titled (and very nearly treated) as a discrete entity; and while some readers may be tempted to do likewise, the progression of Kruks’ argument throughout the book requires more holistic attention to avoid drawing incorrect or overly simplistic conclusions about Beauvoir’s contribution.

Beauvoir, if presented with this volume, would find herself competently situated both historically and in political and feminist theory. And she would feel herself certainly among friends: a great deal of ink is spilt defending Beauvoir against a number of very specific criticisms, stemming mostly from second-wave feminists. This attention, while of course useful to a certain extent, nevertheless distracts from Kruks’s much more interesting and original readings of Beauvoir’s corpus.

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Emily Coolidge-Toker is a recent graduate of Sabanci University’s Cultural Studies program. She received her BA in Sociology from Bryn Mawr College in 2007 and has been living and teaching in Istanbul, Turkey. Her research focuses on translation theory, mimesis, the globalization and politics of English, and diaspora studies. Read reviews by Emily.

 In Political Power and Women’s Representation in Latin America, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer examines the causes and consequences of women’s representation in Latin America. She does so by asking a series of politically relevant and theoretically challenging questions, including why the numbers of women in office have increased in some countries but vary across others; what the presence of women in office means for the way representatives legislate; and what consequences the election of women bears for representative democracy more generally. Schwindt-Bayer shows how the inclusion of women in politics has changed the issues brought into the political arena, writes Natalie Novick.

Political Power and Women’s Representation in Latin America. Leslie Schwindt Bayer. Oxford University Press. November 2012.

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On the opening page of the new paperback edition of Political Power and Women’s Representation in Latin America, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, writes that four women have been elected president of Latin American democracies and that many others have “run for, and seriously contended, executive office.” The number of those elected to presidency has now increased to six – with Laura Chinchilla in Costa Rica and Dilma Rouseff in Brazil taking office – marking the rapid acceleration of the influence and presence of women in all levels of politics in Latin America. Later this year, female candidates will contest presidential elections in Chile and Honduras, as well as legislative elections throughout the region, providing an excellent justification for this look at the impact of women’s representation in the region.

At the time of writing, the percentage of women in national legislatures in Latin America hovers at around 20%, a regional average second only to the Nordic countries. These numbers came about rapidly, and only continue to rise, but despite the rate of change, women remain a minority in legislatures and executive offices in Latin America. This text analyses the variation in women’s representation within Latin America, both descriptively, by examining the percentage of women in government, as well as substantively, by examining outcomes of women’s representation within the legislature. Schwindt-Bayer’s contribution aims to bridge the literature on women’s representation and apply it to the Latin American case using a multidimensional, integrated model.

Schwindt-Bayer’s grasp and command of the existing literature is extensive, and the text is impeccably researched. Schwindt-Bayer seeks to bring sometimes competing earlier explanations together, and apply hypotheses used systematically elsewhere to the understudied Latin American case. However, by resting on this basis, some findings, such as the regional examination of women’s descriptive representation in Chapter 2, are unsurprising. While the quantitative analysis is thoughtfully prepared, the result is not unexpected: a greater presence of women in the legislature in countries with proportional representation electoral systems, gender quotas and longer experiences with democracy. It is rather her examination of the substantive effects of women’s representation where the book provides its greatest contribution. Using original surveys of legislators in Argentina, Colombia and Costa Rica, Schwindt-Bayer was able to collect original data on political preferences, backgrounds, experience and ambition, which are used to provide the bulk of evidence for her chapters on substantive representation (3-7). Schwindt-Bayer finds variation between the issues that male legislators prioritize compared to the issues that female legislators prioritize. Despite expressing the importance of representing all constituents, Schwindt-Bayer’s quantitative models find that women legislators place a higher priority on women’s equality issues than men do, after controlling for other factors. More importantly, these priorities translate into action.

In Chapter 4, Schwindt-Bayer investigates how gender affects bills sponsored by legislators and the participation of legislators in committees and floor debates. While the differences the author finds do not always involve gender issues, they are among the most striking. In nearly all cases she finds that women sponsor more bills related to women’s issues than men, and in the Colombian Senate, women sponsored nearly 15 times more bills related to women’s issues. Furthermore, women participated in floor debates more often on women’s issues. However, these gender differences were not just confined to the legislature. In Chapter 6, Schwindt-Bayer addresses an understudied area of the representation literature, by examining how gender affects legislator actions within the district or constituency. Careful to account for differences between political systems, she finds male and female legislators attend to similar types of district activities, such as attending meetings with similar groups, addressing casework requests, and spending time on constituency service. However, gender differences emerge when examining constituency work dealing with women’s advocacy and responsibility. In all cases, female legislators were more likely to attend activities with women’s groups than their male counterparts, as well as spend more time with female constituents than their male colleagues. Additionally, the wide majority of female representatives surveyed expressed the importance of seeing themselves as a role model for women in their districts, recognizing the symbolic importance of their presence in politics. These results suggest that in many areas, female representatives are more likely to introduce and promote women and women’s issues within the legislature and through work within the district. Schwindt-Bayer’s findings allow her to come to a definitive conclusion, “women in these national legislatures clearly represent women”.

The text accomplishes the goals it sets out for itself, shedding new light on the substantive outcomes of female representation by developing a more comprehensive look at legislative activity, as well as presenting new data gleaned by original survey work. However, some readers may find themselves urging Schwindt-Bayer to push the envelope beyond the safety of the established theoretical perspectives, by showing how the Latin American case is unique and different. This is primarily a book about women’s representation, which uses Latin America as a lens. It is clear when reading the text that Schwindt-Bayer has an excellent command on her case selection and knows the context of her Latin American subjects very well. However, there is little in her methodology that treats Latin America specifically, to set it apart from previous research on representation done in Europe and the United States. In her introduction, Schwindt-Bayer suggests that female legislators in Latin America have moved beyond the “supermadre” archetype prevalent in Latin American politics in the 1960s and 1970s, however, she does not provide enough detail to show what this looks like today, or how this process has taken place. While she mentions the impact of quotas and how reserved seats may impact perceptions and women’s legislative activity, I would have expected a text on women’s representation in Latin America to address quotas more centrally, as the region was the first to adopt gender quotas on a large scale. The ongoing push for quotas in Latin America has had numerous impacts on the way that women are presented for, run for, and behave in office.

While Schwindt-Bayer comes to conclusions about women’s representation that have been explored elsewhere, this text fulfills an important need in the research. The question of whether women legislate differently to men continues to orient many of the critiques against scholarship exploring gender in the political science literature. By thoroughly engaging with, and answering this question, Schwindt-Bayer shows just how much gender matters and how the inclusion of women in politics changes the issues brought into the political arena. She provides conclusive evidence across the scope of legislative behaviour that a legislator’s gender has a substantive impact on political outcomes. Furthermore, by bringing together the vast amount of previous theoretical perspectives, she is able to provide a definitive, evaluation of the literature as well as make the case for its application to other understudied regions.

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Natalie Novick is currently pursuing a PhD in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines the outcomes of cultural and structural inequalities on women’s representation in government and foreign affairs. In 2009 she received her M.Sc. in Comparative European Politics from Trinity College, Dublin. Prior to her graduate studies she worked in legislative affairs in Washington, DC and Phoenix, Arizona. You can find her on twitter @genderpolitics. Read more reviews by Natalie.