Politics

In January 2007 Nancy Pelosi became the first woman to serve as Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Her achievement signified the continued advancement of women, but it also underscored the historical disparity between the sexes in terms of political agency and opportunity. Political questions about sex and gender require an understanding of the relationship between enfranchisement and representation, activism and advocacy, and authority. Women have historically possessed positions of leadership, but these powers were consistently contested, marginalized, and violated. The emergence of political rights in modern Europe and North America has increased women's political freedoms, but women still endure underrepresented and disproportionately held leadership. Initial progress of women to high, elected, national offices has occurred in third-world political settings—Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), India, and Israel are the best examples—where emergent, postcolonial, nation-states are providing enhanced opportunities for female participation in the process of universal franchise.

SEX, GENDER, AND POLITICS IN PREMODERN SOCIETIES

In Greco-Roman society the state (polis) was deeply interconnected with the household (oikos). Males controlled both entities, with the husband, as the head of the household (or the paterfamilias), ruling over his wife, children, and slaves. Based on his understanding that men and women are naturally different (predicated on biological notions of sperm as the seed of life), Aristotle (384–322 bce), in his Politics, affirms the husband as the ruler, for "the male is by nature fitter for command than the female," and thus there is a permanent inequality between them. Supposed to have distinctive natures women were disqualified from citizenship because "the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ at all"; thus, women could not participate in the political life of the community. Aristotle argues that men and women could both possess virtue, but he envisages this virtue as manifested differently and with political implications: "the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying." Within Greek tragedy Sophocles's (c. 496–406 bce) Antigone depicts a woman's struggle to honor her commitments to her family and properly bury her brother Polyneices despite its prohibition by the political ruler Creon (no traitors can receive a proper burial). Though her sister Ismene protests that women cannot challenge political authority ("You ought to realize we are only women, not meant in nature to fight against men, and that we are ruled, by those who are stronger"), Antigone defiantly determines that such resistance is necessary and ultimately suffers death by her own hand (and not by a political means). Judith Butler (2000) retrieves Antigone as a model to examine the relationship between sex, gender, kinship, progressive feminism, and politics.

In early Christian communities women did have some leadership roles. As part of his ministry to challenge unjust social structures, such as patriarchal privilege, Jesus invited women to join his movement. Wealthy women facilitated the development of Christianity by providing space for house churches. Nonetheless, numerous scriptural passages proscribe preaching and teaching by women. Women such as Perpetua (d. 203 ce) became martyrs for the church, but the narratives (written by men) that recorded their feats depicted them as becoming like males in their willingness to suffer and die for their beliefs. In the Middle Ages (476–1350) women served principally as procreative agents and as manual laborers. Denied access to the education that occurred in cathedral schools and in newly established universities, women were not able to secure economic, political, or religious positions of power. Women were governed by strict civil codes, dominant autocratic powers, feudal lords, or ecclesial structures.

SEX, GENDER, POLITICS, AND MODERNITY

In the early modern period, monarchial systems of government were often restrictive and harsh, but they did enable women through familial right and political alliances to ascend to leadership. In Great Britain Queen Mary I and Queen Elizabeth I ruled in the sixteenth centuries, laying the groundwork for Queen Anne (eighteenth century), Queen Victoria (nineteenth century), and Queen Elizabeth II (present day); in Russia, Catherine II (the Great) reigned during the eighteenth century and rebuilt the country. With increasing modernization and the rise of the nation-state, women monarchs gradually became merely symbolic figures. In the early twenty-first century, countries such as Japan still refuse to accept the legitimacy of a woman monarch (regardless of the sex of the firstborn heir).

The Enlightenment (1600–1800) ushered in political, legal, and economic systems that promoted individual autonomy, rationality, progress, and rights, as well as social contract theory. Tolerance, self-determination, and equality constituted central political values, but women did not fully benefit from such values. In his Two Treatises on Government (1690), John Locke proposes a model of a European liberal constitutional state characterized by limited, nontyrannical government, private property, and natural freedom and rights. Yet, as did Aristotle centuries before (though with a greater recognition of shared powers), Locke describes paternal power as normative. Carole Pateman (1988) argues that presuppositions of domination and subordination along gendered lines are embedded in the supposedly gender-neutral social contract theory and European and North American liberalism. The writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, notably her Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), appeal to Enlightenment ideals of rationality and equality to promote the political rights of women. Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft holds that the British constitutional structure created class divisions and that women needed wider educational opportunities and property rights. Nearly a century later the English philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) wrote The Subjection of Women (1869), a treatise dedicated to promoting the equality of men and women. Mill notes the burgeoning political protests of women in Europe and in the United States seeking to attain this equality.

WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE AND PARTICIPATION IN POLITICAL OFFICE IN THE UNITED STATES

Protests by women helped to mobilize political change in the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) had specifically referred to the denial of males aged twenty-one and older the right to vote as unconstitutional; women challenged this narrow construal of political citizenship. Suffrage for women at the federal level occurred in the United States in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. This achievement was made possible only through the efforts of women activists and reformers. Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1848 helped to galvanize the women's suffrage movement at the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. The convention culminated in The Declaration of Sentiments, which concluded:

Now in view of this entire disfranchisement of one-half the people of this country, their social and religious degradation—in view of the unjust laws above mentioned, and because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.

                          (Stanton 1881, pp. 70-71)

Susan B. Anthony advocated for women's voting and social rights on constitutional grounds and, with Stanton, founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. Ida B. Wells (1862–1931) led an antilynching campaign and resistance to gender and racial injustice. Jane Addams (1860–1935) addressed social justice and urban poverty by establishing the Hull-House in Chicago. Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962) served in the League of Women Voters and the Women's Trade Union League.

The Nineteenth Amendment signaled progress, but it further demonstrated a substantial political chasm along sex and gender lines. The right to vote for women came fifty years after African-American males had gained the franchise through the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment and seventy-two years after the Seneca Falls Convention. Even after women had achieved the universal franchise, they faced political, legal, and social obstacles. Local communities attempted deterrent mechanisms, such as poll taxes and voting tests, all of which violated the constitutional right of enfranchisement. Despite these obstacles women gradually achieved greater political participation. In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945) appointed the first woman to a cabinet position, designating Frances Perkins (1882–1965) to head the Department of Labor. Jeane Kirkpatrick (1926–2006) served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 1981 to 1985, and Madeleine Albright (1997–2001) and Condoleezza Rice (b. 19954) served as secretary of state in the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, respectively. In the 110th U.S. Congress of 2007, there were eighty-seven women, with sixteen women in the Senate (16 percent of the seats) and seventy-one in the House of Representatives (16.3 percent of the seats).

WOMEN, POLITICS, AND THE GLOBAL COMMUNITY

In terms of international developments, the United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women (1952) promoted and protected the freedoms and rights of women. The first three articles secure women's entitlement to vote on equal terms with men, women's eligibility for election to all publicly elected bodies, and women's entitlement to hold public office and to exercise all public functions established by national law. In several countries women have used grassroots organizations to help transform totalitarian regimes and dictatorships into democratic governments. For example, Jeong-Lim Nam (2000) discusses the contributions that women—formally excluded from the political process—made in the South Korean transition to democracy in the 1980s. Women demonstrated on the grounds of human rights, social justice, and democratic freedoms and utilized interunion solidarity strikes and labor union activities. Women have increasingly participated in global protests and global conferences to identify the central political issues impacting women.

Through the work of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), women have also influenced the formation and implementation of international law. For example, the efforts, advocacy, and leadership of the Women's Caucus for Gender Justice at the Rome Conference (1998) on the International Criminal Court helped establish codified punishments for the crimes of mass rape and forced pregnancy. Nonetheless, the continued practices of honor killings, female infanticide, and female genital mutilation demonstrate the oppressive character of tradition and political authority. Autocratic powers, whether in the form of monarchies or military regimes, govern women strictly and do not afford enfranchisement. Countries such as Saudi Arabia continue to deny women the right to vote.

Since the mid-1960s a number of women have ascended to political leadership. Prominent examples include Indira Gandhi, prime minister of India (from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 to 1984); Golda Meir, prime minister of Israel (from 1969 to 1974); Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of Great Britain (from 1979 to 1990); Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany (elected 2005); and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, president of Liberia (elected 2006). Since the 1970s women have held presidencies or prime minister positions in Bangladesh, Chile, Finland, Iceland, Indonesia, Ireland, Latvia, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, the Philippines, Sri Lanka—where Sirimavo Bandaranaike was appointed the world's first female prime minister upon her husband's assassination in July 1960—and Turkey. These positions have principally been in the so-called developed or first-world countries; by contrast, women in the so-called developing or third-world countries have endured significant marginalization from political structures.

THEORIES OF WOMEN AND POLITICS

Feminist thinkers have engaged a number of lenses and interlocutors in discussing sex, gender, and politics. Feminist theories of politics have appealed to Karl Marx's (1818–1883) theories of class struggle, oppositional consciousness, and historical materialism, and Michel Foucault's (1926–1984) genealogies of knowledge, sexuality, and power. Other feminists insist that politics should attend more fully to a care approach (focusing on relationships and trust) rather than a justice approach (focusing on universal, rational principles). Contemporary debates about democracy and gender focus on questions of difference. Whether construed in terms of race, gender, class, ethnicity, or other distinguishing factors, dimensions of difference have resulted in identity politics. Feminist thinkers such as Iris Marion Young, however, prefer the term politics of difference, holding that "political claims asserted from the specificity of social group position, and which argue that the polity should attend to these social differences, often serve as a resource for rather than an obstruction of democratic communication that aims at justice" (2000, p. 82). Hence, Young argues, there is need for pluralistic representation to address and engage constructively these differences.

Seyla Benhabib also addresses questions of difference, and she critiques the tradition of European and North American political thought that has differentiated public and private in extreme terms. The deconstruction of the female self has occurred through public rhetoric that has assumed household duties, reproductive choices, and care for the young as exclusively private and thereby inaccessible to public political discourse and debate. Benhabib insists that these putative distinctions are false dichotomies and deleterious to women's participation in society: "Challenging the distinction of contemporary moral and political discourse, to the extent that they privatize these issues, is central to women's struggles which intend to make these issues 'public'" (1992, p. 108). Women must continue to struggle to exercise their political voices.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aristotle. 1947. Politics, trans. Benjamin Jowett. In Introduction to Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Modern Library.

Benhabib, Seyla. 1992. Situating the Self: Gender, Community, and Postmodernism in Contemporary Ethics. New York: Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2000. Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press.

Henderson, Sarah L., and Alana S. Jeydel. 2007. Participation and Protest: Women and Politics in a Global World. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mill, John Stuart. 2004 [1869]. The Subjection of Women. London: Kessinger Publishing.

Nam, Jeong-Lim. 2000. "Gender Politics in the Korean Transition to Democracy." Korean Studies 24: 94-112.

Pateman, Carole. 1988. The Sexual Contract. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Stanton, Elizabeth Cady; Susan B. Anthony; Matilda Joslyn Gage; and Ida Husted Harper, eds. 1881. A History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 1. New York: Fowler and Wells.

United Nations. 1952. "Convention on the Political Rights of Women." Available from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/22.htm.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. 2004 [1792]. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Miriam Brody. London: Penguin.

Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Inclusion and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

                                          Charlotte Radler