Women and US Politics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

This collection maps the field of women and U.S. politics on the basis of leading international and interdisciplinary scholarship informed by political science, cultural studies, literary studies, history, and media studies. The volume focuses in particular on women’s political activism, how politics affects women, and the role of gender in politics. Recent research has called for an integrated interdisciplinary approach in analyzing women’s roles in U.S. politics, pointing out the shortcomings of earlier investigations, which mostly confined themselves to one subject area. Using this as a starting point, the volume features research that analyzes the agency women have possessed in the political sphere in the U.S. from various disciplinary perspectives. Its essays trace the role of women in U.S. politics from the Early Republic until today. Contributions include examinations of fictional and non-fictional negotiations of gendered politics in a range of media, as well as investigations of how U.S. politics past and present are conceptualized and practiced in relation to gender.