Are you one of the growing number of women who feels betrayed by political parties and mainstream feminist organizations who can no longer define what a woman is, let alone represent women's interests? Practical Politics for Bold Women is for women's rights campaigners who want to be heard, but may not be sure where to start. If you've ever gotten anyone else to agree to work with you towards a common goal, this book lays out steps you can take to build towards political achievement and influence.

Pearls, Politics, and Power is a call to action for new political engagement and leadership from the women of America. Informed by conversations with elected women leaders from all levels, former three-term Vermont Governor and Ambassador to Switzerland Madeleine M. Kunin asks: What difference do women make? What is the worst part of politics, and what is the best part? What inspired these women to run, and how did they prepare themselves for public life? How did they raise money, protect their families' privacy, deal with criticism and attack ads, and work with the good old boys? Kunin's core message is that America needs an infusion of new leadership to better address the major problems of our time. To see how women can achieve that goal, she combines her personal experience in politics; the lessons of past women's movements; the stories of young women today who have new ideas about their role in society; and interviews with a wide range of women in positions of power, looking for clues to their leadership, as well as the effects of gender stereotyping. She interviews Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, analyzes her campaign, and addresses the question: "Is the country ready?" Other interviewees include U.S. Representatives Loretta Sanchez, Linda Sanchez, Deborah Pryce, and Tammy Baldwin, and U.S. Senators Susan Collins, Amy Klobuchar, and Carol Moseley Braun, and Governors Kathleen Sibelius and Janet Napolitano. The next generation of women will be inspired to lead by seeing women like Nancy Pelosi wielding the gavel, and seeing themselves reflected in the portraits in statehouses, courthouses, corporate and university boardrooms, and the White House. Pearls, Politics, and Power will help ensure that this inspiration is not soured or deflected, but channeled into successful candidacies by America's leaders of tomorrow. What will it take for women to assume their rightful places in the political corridors of power?

Violence against women is one of the most insidious social ills facing the world today. Yet governmental response is inconsistent, ranging from dismissal to aggressive implementation of policies and programs to combat the problem. In her comparative study of thirty-six democratic governments, Laurel Weldon examines the root causes and consequences of the differences in public policy from Northern Europe to Latin America. She reveals that factors that often influence the development of social policies do not determine policies on violence against women. Neither economic level, religion, region, nor the number of women in government determine governmental responsiveness to this problem. Weldon demonstrates, for example, that Nordic governments take no more action to combat violence against women than Latin American governments, even though the Swedish welfare state is often considered a leader in social policy, particularly with regard to women’s issues. Instead, the presence of independently organized, active women’s movements plays a greater role in placing violence against women on the public agenda. The breadth and scope of governmental response is greatly enhanced by the presence of an office dedicated to promoting women’s status. Weldon closes with practical lessons and insights to improve government action on violence against women and other important issues of social justice and democracy.

Sex remains one of the most salient demographic dividing points in American politics today. President Obama has women, particularly unmarried women, to thank for his re-election victory. The gender difference in voter support for the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates grew from twelve points in 2008 to eighteen points in 2012. This gender gap in candidate preference likely emerges because of gender gaps in policy preferences. Yet despite much scholarly and popular interest in this topic, the cause or causes of gender gaps in policy preference remain unclear. The Political Battle of the Sexes: Exploring the Sources of Gender Gaps in Policy Preferences examines gender gaps in policy preferences in the United States, outlines their form, and explores their causes. This work makes four contributions to the literature on gender gaps. First, it provides the first comprehensive look at gender gaps across time and various issue areas completed since the 1980s. Second, it provides a theoretical framework for explaining the causes of gender gap emergence that incorporates both nature (biology) and nurture (socialization) and provides the basis with which to predict the attitudes on which gender gaps will likely emerge. Third, it explores the causes of gender gaps in foreign and social policy, two of the policy domains where gender gaps continue to increase. Finally, it introduces a new way of conceptualizing biology based on emerging research in the hard sciences. Studying gender gaps remains difficult. Women comprise a very diverse group, and are divided by far more factors than the sex categorization that unites them. However, electoral realities demand that scholars studying political behavior pay attention to sex based differences in political preferences. Women exhibit consistent preference tendencies relative to men, and women remain more likely to show up on Election Day than men. As such, gender gaps have substantial political and practical implications for women in the United States. And while explaining their causes requires drawing from a wide array of fields, ranging from biology to economics, understanding the origins and consequences of gender gaps does much to further empirical research in public opinion and mass behavior.

A discussion of women thinkers in political philosophy, and the nature of political inquiry --Provided by publisher.

Contemporary feminist theory and postmodernism have left significant marks on how we think about practical matters, most notably the old and new forms of gender struggles that many women confront in their daily lives. The essays collected in Gender Struggles are designed to highlight those influences by addressing the following questions: What is practical feminism in a postmodern world? How does rethinking the nature and boundaries of philosophy affect the way we understand practical issues that we confront daily? What new forms of freedom, autonomy, subjectivity, social welfare, motherhood, public and private space, and political resistance have emerged from this new philosophical sense? Together, the sixteen essays in this volume represent many different voices of feminists who boldly take up familiar, everyday concerns from unorthodox vantage points within new conceptual and theoretical frameworks. The essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the home. Incorporating the latest, most 'cutting-edge' material on feminism, this volume aims at reaching a broad spectrum of readers by connecting postmodern feminist theory with concrete issues that are practical and relevant to their daily lives and experiences.