Women's Political Voice

Since the 1960's, academic and activist women have been challenging the conventional wisdom about political life and the study of politics. Organizing her book by standard political concepts—the mobilization and participation of the mass public; the recruitment, policy preferences, and political style of public officials; agenda-setting; and coalition-building—Janet Flammang subjects these concepts to a withering feminist critique based on the insights of feminist theory and the empirical evidence of hundreds of studies of women's distinctive politics.

This book accomplishes four major tasks:

• It provides a comprehensive critical history of the changing research on politics and the changing nature of the political science discipline.

• It analyzes the course of women's political activism in the United States.

• It develops a rich case study of women's politics in Northern California's Silicon Valley, an area once nicknamed "the feminist capital of the nation."

• It examines coalitions and divisions within the women's movement with sensitivity to minority politics, as in the chapter subtitled, "The Hard Work of Sisterhood."

Women's Political Voice records the transformative politics of the women's movement and, simultaneously, urges political scientists to ask new questions and to adopt new methods.