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  3. Cambridge Studies in Gender and Politics

Cambridge Studies in Gender and Politics publishes rigorous, problem-driven research on key questions of gender and politics broadly defined. The series provides new theoretical insights and expanded empirical evidence on the role of gender, gendered identities, and intersectionality in political life.

  • Lead Editors: Rachel Brulé, Boston University, Ana Catalano Weeks, University of Bath
  • Associate Editors: Tiffany Barnes, University of Texas, Austin, Diana O’Brien, Washington University, St Louis, Soledad Artiz Prillaman, Stanford University, Dawn Teele, The Johns Hopkins University, Jakana Thomas, University of California, San Diego
  • Advisory Boards: Phillip M. Ayoub, University College London, Rachel Bernhard, University of Oxford, Marie Berry, University of Denver, Nadia Brown, Georgetown University, Sarah Bush, University of Pennsylvania, Erin Cassese, University of Delaware, Dara Cohen, Harvard University, Katrina Forrester, Harvard University, Mirya Holman, University of Houston, Sabrina Karim, Cornell University, Rainbow Murray, Queen Mary University of London, Leslie Schwindt-Bayer, Rice University, Øyvind Skorge, Oslo New University, Sophie Smith, University of Oxford, Shatema Threadcraft, Vanderbilt University

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10 results in Cambridge Studies in Gender and Politics

After Equality
  • LGBT Activism in Argentina and South Africa
  • Julie Moreau
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • After Equality tackles one of the biggest challenges facing LGBT activists in many parts of the world: how to move beyond inclusive legislation to ensure LGBT people can exercise their newly acquired rights. Drawing from in-depth interviews and ethnographic observation with two lesbian organizations in Buenos Aires, Argentina and Cape Town, South Africa, Julie Moreau explores the ways that organizations use identity to make rights useful. Engaging interdisciplinary scholarship and intersectional theory, Moreau develops a novel approach to identity strategizing that explains how activists engage multiple identities to challenge the relationships between identity categories and address the ways interlocking systems of power affect their constituents. By analyzing sexual identity as always constructed through race, class and gender, the book transforms how scholars understand the role of identity in the strategic repertoires of social movement organizations and illuminates dimensions of identity politics that surface in the aftermath of legal inclusion.

Intersectional Advocacy
  • Redrawing Policy Boundaries Around Gender, Race, and Class
  • Margaret Perez Brower
  • Published online:
    05 January 2024
    Print publication:
    04 January 2024
  • What happens to those living at the margins of US politics and policy – trapped between multiple struggles: gender-based violence, poverty, homelessness, unaffordable healthcare, mass incarceration and immigration? In this book, Margaret Perez Brower offers the concept of 'intersectional advocacy' to reveal how select organizations addressing gender-based violence are closing policy gaps that perpetuate inequalities by gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Intersectional advocacy is a roadmap for rethinking public policy. The book captures how advocacy groups strategically contest, reimagine, and reconfigure policy institutions using comprehensive new strategies that connect issues together. As these groups challenge traditional ways of addressing the most pressing social issues in the US, they uncover deep inequities that are housed within these institutions. Ultimately, organizations practicing intersectional advocacy illuminate how to redraw the boundaries of policies in ways that transform US democracy to be more representative, equitable, and just.

Equality Unfulfilled
  • How Title IX's Policy Design Undermines Change to College Sports
  • James N. Druckman, Elizabeth A. Sharrow
  • Published online:
    06 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023
  • The year 1972 is often hailed as an inflection point in the evolution of women's rights. Congress passed Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, a law that outlawed sex-based discrimination in education. Many Americans celebrate Title IX for having ushered in an era of expanded opportunity for women's athletics; yet fifty years after its passage, sex-based inequalities in college athletics remain the reality. Equality Unfulfilled explains why. The book identifies institutional roadblocks – including sex-based segregation, androcentric organizational cultures, and overbearing market incentives – that undermine efforts to achieve systemic change. Drawing on surveys with student-athletes, athletic administrators, college coaches, members of the public, and fans of college sports, it highlights how institutions shape attitudes toward gender equity policy. It offers novel lessons not only for those interested in college sports but for everyone seeking to understand the barriers that any marginalized group faces in their quest for equality.

Making Gender Salient
  • From Gender Quota Laws to Policy
  • Ana Catalano Weeks
  • Published online:
    09 June 2022
    Print publication:
    30 June 2022
  • Do gender quota laws – policies that mandate women's inclusion on parties' candidate slates – affect policy outcomes? Making Gender Salient tackles this crucial question by offering a new theory to understand when and how gender quota laws impact policy. Drawing on cross-national data from high-income democracies and a mixed-methods research design, the book argues that quotas lead to policy change for issues characterized by a gender gap in preferences, especially if these issues deviate from the usual left/right party policy divide. The book focuses on one such issue, work-family policies, and finds that quotas shift work-family policies in the direction of gender equality. Substantive chapters show that quotas make gender more salient by giving women louder voices within parties, providing access to powerful ministerial roles, and encouraging male party leaders to compete on previously marginalized issues. The book concludes that quotas are one important way of facilitating congruence between women's policy preferences and actual policy outcomes.

Women, Power, and Property
  • The Paradox of Gender Equality Laws in India
  • Rachel E. Brulé
  • Published online:
    16 October 2020
    Print publication:
    22 October 2020
  • Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Party Institutionalization and Women's Representation in Democratic Brazil
  • Kristin N. Wylie
  • Published online:
    23 July 2018
    Print publication:
    02 August 2018
  • Brazil's quality of democracy remains limited by enduring obstacles including the weakness of parties and underrepresentation of marginalized groups. Party Institutionalization and Women's Representation in Democratic Brazil theorizes the connections across those problems, explaining how weakly institutionalized and male-dominant parties interact to undermine descriptive representation in Brazil. This book draws on an original multilevel database of 27,653 legislative candidacies spanning six election cycles, over 100 interviews, and field observations from throughout Brazil. Wylie demonstrates that more inclusive participation in candidate-centered elections amidst raced-gendered structural inequities relies on institutionalized parties with the capacity to support women, and the will, heralded by party leadership, to do so. The book illustrates how women leaders in Brazil's more institutionalized parties enable white and Afro-descendant female aspirants to navigate the masculinized terrain of formal politics. It enhances our understanding of how parties mediate electoral rules, as well as institutional and party change in the context of weak but robustly gendered institutions.

The Logics of Gender Justice
  • State Action on Women's Rights Around the World
  • Mala Htun, S. Laurel Weldon
  • Published online:
    23 February 2018
    Print publication:
    01 March 2018
  • When and why do governments promote women's rights? Through comparative analysis of state action in seventy countries from 1975 to 2005, this book shows how different women's rights issues involve different histories, trigger different conflicts, and activate different sets of protagonists. Change on violence against women and workplace equality involves a logic of status politics: feminist movements leverage international norms to contest women's subordination. Family law, abortion, and contraception, which challenge the historical claim of religious groups to regulate kinship and reproduction, conform to a logic of doctrinal politics, which turns on relations between religious groups and the state. Publicly-paid parental leave and child care follow a logic of class politics, in which the strength of Left parties and overall economic conditions are more salient. The book reveals the multiple and complex pathways to gender justice, illuminating the opportunities and obstacles to social change for policymakers, advocates, and others seeking to advance women's rights.

Counting Women's Ballots
  • Female Voters from Suffrage through the New Deal
  • J. Kevin Corder, Christina Wolbrecht
  • Published online:
    05 May 2016
    Print publication:
    25 May 2016
  • How did the first female voters cast their ballots? For almost 100 years, answers to this question have eluded scholars. Counting Women's Ballots employs new data and novel methods to provide insights into whether, how, and with what consequences women voted in the elections after suffrage. The analysis covers a larger and more diverse set of places, over a longer period of time, than has previously been possible. J. Kevin Corder and Christina Wolbrecht find that the extent to which women voted and which parties they supported varied considerably across time and place, challenging attempts to describe female voters in terms of simple generalizations. Many women adapted quickly to their new right; others did not. In some cases, women reinforced existing partisan advantages; in others, they contributed to dramatic political realignment. Counting Women's Ballots improves our understanding of the largest expansion of the American electorate during a transformative period of American history.

Inclusion without Representation in Latin America
  • Gender Quotas and Ethnic Reservations
  • Mala Htun
  • Published online:
    18 December 2015
    Print publication:
    14 January 2016
  • This book analyzes why and how fifteen Latin American countries modified their political institutions to promote the inclusion of women, Afrodescendants, and indigenous peoples. Through analysis and comparison of experiences in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico, the book accounts for the origins of quotas and reserved seats in international norms and civic mobilization. It shows how the configuration of political institutions and the structure of excluded groups set the terms and processes of inclusion. Arguing that the new mechanisms have delivered inclusion but not representation, the book demonstrates that quotas and reserved seats increased the presence in power of excluded groups but did not create constituencies or generate civic movements able to authorize or hold accountable their representatives.

Women and Power in Postconflict Africa
  • Aili Mari Tripp
  • Published online:
    05 November 2015
    Print publication:
    20 October 2015
  • The book explains an unexpected consequence of the decrease in conflict in Africa after the 1990s. Analysis of cross-national data and in-depth comparisons of case studies of Uganda, Liberia and Angola show that post-conflict countries have significantly higher rates of women's political representation in legislatures and government compared with countries that have not undergone major conflict. They have also passed more legislative reforms and made more constitutional changes relating to women's rights. The study explains how and why these patterns emerged, tying these outcomes to the conjuncture of the rise of women's movements, changes in international women's rights norms and, most importantly, gender disruptions that occur during war. This book will help scholars, students, women's rights activists, international donors, policy makers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others better understand some of the circumstances that are most conducive to women's rights reform today and why.