Few studies of women’s political participation encompass as extensive a time frame as Kristin Goss’s new volume. In The Paradox of Gender Equality, Goss examines 120 years of appearances before Congress by women’s organizations. The data that she has gathered to trace the historical waxing and waning of women’s congressional testimonies are unmatched. She charts the frequency of women’s congressional appearances, as well as the content of their testimonies, to examine not only women’s political efforts but the issues they spoke to and the arguments they used. With an historic lens this wide, Goss fundamentally deepens our understanding of the history of women’s political engagement. Her data show that over the past century, women have gone from impressively high numbers of appearances before Congress, peaking in the 1930s and 1940s, to a rather steady decline since the second wave of feminist activity in the 1970s and early 1980s. In fact, as she states, “[b]etween the early 1980s and 2000, women’s engagement crashed” (p. 166). A core goal of her book, then, is to explain why this crash happened. She asks why women’s presence before Congress has diminished so noticeably in the last few decades, and how a comparison with the earlier twentieth century can help us understand this modern decline.

Ultimately, the answers to these questions, according to Goss’s analysis, are rooted in a policy-feedback effect, one that took hold with new initiatives in the early 1960s—specifically, the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women of 1961, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. These policy developments worked to reshape the political environment for women, creating political and legal opportunities and centering discourse and activism on “equality” and “rights equal to those of men.” The founding of the National Organization for Women was premised on attaining equal status for women. Efforts to maintain workplace protective legislation (which emphasized women’s difference, not equality with men) began to disappear, and instead, feminist activists stepped up their calls for an Equal Rights Amendment, to put women fully on an equal legal footing with their male counterparts.

As Goss highlights, the casualties of this change were a set of women’s organizations that through much of the preceding twentieth century had played a dominant role in public appearances by women, especially those before Congress, groups such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Parent-Teacher Association, the Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, the American Association of University Women, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and the League of Women Voters. These more “traditional” groups had pursued a broad policy agenda, arriving in Washington, DC, to testify before Congress on immigration, defense and national security, education, consumer safety, and alcohol abuse. Although women’s rights appeared on their agendas at times, more commonly their scope remained much broader. Goss argues that as the new feminist politics unfolded in the 1970s, the participant base in women’s traditional political organizations began to narrow. And it was these traditional groups that drove the high levels of women’s appearances before Congress, especially in the 1930s and 1940s but throughout the entire era from the 1920s to the 1950s.

As Goss rightly points out, the twentieth-century pattern of political engagement by traditional women’s organizations refutes the “wave” metaphor so routinely used to define women’s political activism in the twentieth century. Her data show ongoing political advocacy by women between the waves of suffrage and ERA activism. And between these mass mobilizations for women’s rights, Goss finds clear evidence of a broader women’s movement, not a feminist mobilization but a mobilization of women as “good citizens,” concerned about a variety of national issues impacting not just women but men, children, and whole families and communities. But with the rise of equal-rights feminism, many traditional women’s groups largely withdrew from national politics. In Goss’s data, this shows up in declines in traditional groups’ appearances before Congress. The groups lost members and came to be understood by many second-wave feminists as traditional and even outmoded women’s organizations.

The Paradox of Gender Equality is likely to have far-reaching impacts on the study of women’s political engagement. Scholars will want to explore how Goss’s indicator of women’s political efforts—appearances before Congress—compares to other forms of women’s political action, both in overall historical trends and in causal associations. So, for instance, one might ask, how women’s congressional testimony compares to women’s voter participation, women’s campaigns for public office, women’s officeholding, and women’s extrainstitutional (“in-the-streets”) activism. A quick look at the data shows that the overall trends are not clearly aligned. Are Goss findings concerning women’s congressional appearances helpful in thinking about these other forms of political engagement? Where do the important differences among them lie? My guess is that her work is already prompting other scholars to pose such questions.

One can also ask whether Goss is correct. Her data reveal a dramatic late-twentieth-century change in women’s organizations’ congressional activism (measured both in terms of absolute number of congressional testimonies and as a proportion of all hearings). The root cause of the decline, according to the author, is the narrowing and focusing effect that equal-rights policies of the early 1960s had on women’s second-wave activism and the resulting supplanting of traditional women’s groups’ membership and activism. When second-wave feminist activism quieted down, women’s political presence before Congress dwindled as well. But does the best explanation lie in the policy-feedback effect that Goss points to as setting all this in motion?

To Goss’s credit, she carefully sifts through the evidence to consider a host of alternative explanations, and in the end, as she sets aside a number of these explanations, her accounts are convincing. For instance, she finds that the rates of women’s groups appearing before Congress, especially late in the twentieth century, have fallen behind those of other interest groups. Goss concludes that this is evidence that declining congressional openness to interest-group input more generally is not a factor driving the change for women. Nor, she finds, is women’s diminished presence linked to changes in partisan control of Congress, shifting congressional agendas, and women’s growing presence in the House and Senate. She also argues that policy specialization, which created expert niches for some women’s groups, may limit the groups’ appeal to potential constituents overall, but that the narrowing has not completely undermined their presence in Washington. Additionally, she shows that funding for feminist groups has increased since 1970, and so this, too, she argues, is not the cause of fewer appearances before Congress. Finally, she builds a strong case that women’s organizations at the end of the twentieth century did not shift away from Congress into other venues, such as the courts.

One might reasonably argue, however, that rising employment has directly competed for women’s time late in the twentieth century, and that this is a better and more immediate explanation of the decline in their political engagement, at least in terms of joining organizations and leading the charge before Congress. Organizational work, especially preparing congressional testimonies and traveling to Washington, requires significant time commitments. Perhaps this is a better explanation.

As Goss reveals, the role of employment is complex. It can limit women’s capacity for organizational work but it can also promote such work. Women’s employment certainly can constrain their ability to offer long hours to civic associations, especially when women also have family responsibilities. But at the same time, employment can create occupational and professional interests that spark motivation for great political activism. Also, Goss points out, women’s employment rises steadily across the century and thus coincides with both increases in their congressional appearances in the earlier part of the century and decreases late in the century. The relationship is clearly not a simple one. The author also cites well-known work by Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba (2001), The Private Roots of Public Action, and by Robert Putnam (2000), Bowling Alone, showing little evidence that the increase in women’s labor force participation sidelined their civic engagement. While Goss acknowledges the important demands that full-time employment can place on individuals, the influences of women’s employment on women’s political engagement are not straightforward.

In the end, Goss comes back to the policy-feedback effect. The equal-rights policies of the early 1960s set in motion a series of changes in women’s activism, narrowing its focus to the gaining of equal legal and employment rights for women. When important gains were won, the push for change began to ebb. But as a result of this shift, traditional women’s organizations that were strong in the earlier part of the century were now substantially less vibrant, and as equal-rights activism declined, women’s congressional activism declined as well. The equal-rights policies of the early 1960s brought substantial change, and from The Paradox of Gender Equality we learn that the policies’ influence was even greater than previously thought.