This book explores the complex relationship between women’s presence and impact in two strikingly different, consecutive congresses. Drawing on hundreds of elite interviews and archival information, the case studies of three highly visible policy areas (reproductive rights, women’s health, and health care policy) move beyond the question of ‘Do women make a difference?’ to confront the oft-ignored, contested issues surrounding gender difference and impact: its probabilistic nature, contested legitimacy, and disputed meaning. The analysis enhances understanding of how gendered forces at the individual, institutional, and societal levels combine to reinforce and redefine gendered relationships to power in the public sphere, and suggests strategies to strengthen substantive representation of women.

National surveys of state legislators conducted by the Center for the American Woman and Politics between 1977 and 1988 suggest that women's presence within state legislatures has increased despite the persistence of gender differences in the connection between public roles and private responsibilities. Mothers (but not fathers) of young children are substantially underrepresented among state legislators, and marriage continues to bring more advantage to men's than to women's political careers. Women continue to reach the legislative rung on the political ladder later than men, and women legislators are less likely than their male colleagues to hold extralegislative employment. While structural changes may reduce the incumbency advantage that some suggest have disadvantaged women, so long as gender differences in the compatibility of legislative service and private roles persist, fewer women than men at any given time will be positioned to take advantage of new opportunities, thereby making improvements in descriptive and substantive representation elusive and difficult goals to accomplish.

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This chapter acknowledges the compelling evidence that women in public office make a difference, even as it explores the controversies that often lurk beneath the surface of such assertions: the probabilistic rather than deterministic nature of the relationship between descriptive and substantive representation of women; the contested legitimacy of women representing women; and disagreement about what it means to represent women. To that end, the chapter explores the need to develop theoretical and empirical models that recognize diversity, to take actions out of a contextual vacuum, to re-examine the appropriateness of the empirical models that structure the analysis, to confront (and ultimately counteract) institutional and cultural pressures that call into question the legitimacy of women representing women, and to acknowledge the conceptual weaknesses that belie the tendency to treat gender difference as a synonym for substantive representation of women.

Thorough and insightful, this edited collection will benefit scholars at every level of expertise. It is a must-read for gender and politics scholars. However, it should be a must-read for every scholar whose work touches on U.S. electoral and legislative politics. Indeed, it brings to light the gendered nature of institutions and culture. In doing so, it sets the stage for rethinking the fairness of those things that are taken for granted as the ways a democracy "should" work, and for establishing new standards against which traditions, old and new, should be measured. The book contributes to the movement of gender into the core of political science and democratic political theory, even as it makes a compelling case that the revolution in women's political representation has far to go before the ideals of gender equity are reached.The aims of the editors are 1) to understand the impact of second-wave feminism's "revolution" on women's relationship to the political and on the field of political science, and 2) to define the direction of future research. The contributors push beyond simple questions to highlight the sometimes glaring gaps in our understanding of gender and the potential for a transformation of our political system. As Christina Wolbrecht notes in the introduction, "The authors of these chapters do not simply recount the findings of the vast literature that has grown up in the past three-plus decades; rather they provide frameworks for understanding and organizing that scholarship; focus attention on critical theoretical, methodological, and empirical debates; and point Published by