Previous experiments have shown that college students benefit when they understand that challenges in the transition to college are common and improvable and, thus, that early struggles need not portend a permanent lack of belonging or potential. Could such an approach-called a lay theory intervention-be effective before college matriculation? Could this strategy reduce a portion of racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic achievement gaps for entire institutions? Three double-blind experiments tested this possibility. Ninety percent of first-year college students from three institutions were randomly assigned to complete single-session, online lay theory or control materials before matriculation (n > 9,500). The lay theory interventions raised first-year full-time college enrollment among students from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds exiting a high-performing charter high school network or entering a public flagship university (experiments 1 and 2) and, at a selective private university, raised disadvantaged students' cumulative first-year grade point average (experiment 3). These gains correspond to 31-40% reductions of the raw (unadjusted) institutional achievement gaps between students from disadvantaged and nondisadvantaged backgrounds at those institutions. Further, follow-up surveys suggest that the interventions improved disadvantaged students' overall college experiences, promoting use of student support services and the development of friendship networks and mentor relationships. This research therefore provides a basis for further tests of the generalizability of preparatory lay theories interventions and of their potential to reduce social inequality and improve other major life transitions. inequality | behavioral science | field experiment | social psychology | lay theories

Comparative research on the origins of modern welfare states typically asks why certain European nations, including Great Britain, enacted pensions and social insurance between the 1880s and the 1920s, while the United States “lagged behind,” that is did not establish such policies for the entire nation until the Social Security Act of 1935. To put the question this way overlooks the social policies that were distinctive to the early twentieth-century United States. During the period when major European nations, including Britain, were launching paternalist versions of the modern welfare state, the United States was tentatively experimenting with what might be called a maternalist welfare state. In Britain, male bureaucrats and party leaders designed policies “for the good” of male wage-workers and their dependents. Meanwhile, in the United States, early social policies were championed by elite and middle-class women “for the good” of less privileged women. Adult American women were helped as mothers, or as working women who deserved special protection because they were potential mothers.

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The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution had surprisingly little impact on women's citizenship or the American constitutional order. For seventy-two years, from 1848 until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, suffrage was the central demand of the woman rights movement in the United States. Women demanded the right to vote in the nineteenth century because they believed it would make them first class citizens with all the rights and privileges of other first class citizens. Both normatively and instrumentally, the suffragists believed that voting would secure equal citizenship for women by raising their civic status and allowing them to assert their political interests. Yet in many ways women were more politically efficacious in the years just prior to the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment than they were afterward. Further, their ability to claim rights from the courts and legislatures, on the basis of their new status as voting citizens, was limited.

What effect has the study of gender had on political science? Compared to other branches of the social sciences, political science has been among the most resistant to feminist analysis. Political science scholarship generally is divided into four main subfields: political theory, American politics, comparative politics, and international relations. There are great disparities between these areas in the types and amount of gender scholarship that has been done. While feminist theory has become an accepted part of political theory, it has had a more limited impact in the other areas. Furthermore, where gender scholarship has appeared, it is often guided by intellectually conservative epistemological and methodological assumptions. Focusing on current major themes and significant works in the discipline, this article explores the differences in gender scholarship between subfields.