Today, women are part of the state as well as political members of the world's states. In little more than a century, they have gone from being completely excluded from everything political and governmental to being included as voters, decision makers, and objects of state institutional interest. Evidence of this change is concrete: ubiquitous policies enabling women's suffrage, widespread establishment of national women's machinery (NWM), and proliferation of legislative sex quotas. These policies have often been studied separately through case studies or cross-national comparative analysis. In contrast, Women and States uses international relations theory to study all of them in the context of the international society of states.
Ann E. Towns adopts constructivist approaches (whether these approaches rise to the level of theory is contested) for her analysis. Yet she challenges those constructivist frameworks that read the proliferation of policies such as suffrage or sex quotas across the world as further evidence of trends toward Western-dominated global homogeneity. On the contrary, Towns argues, when viewing patterns of adoption of suffrage, NWMs, and sex quotas, it is evident that it is difference, specifically hierarchies among various states, not homogeneity that explains the changes. Towns offers a framework that focuses on the interplay of norms, or justifications for adopting particular policies, and stratification—the identification of some states as inferior to others with respect to those norms that the policy would realize. Which states rank higher with respect to such norms varies with particular policies, and over time and it is clear that there is no one explanation for the infiltration of women into state processes.
The book's aims are the basis for the organization of chapters, basically in two parts. The first chapters review pertinent theory, describing and critiquing conventional approaches and elaborating the place of norms in international society and their link to relations of hierarchy among states. The later chapters offer the empirical evidence that supports the norms/hierarchy framework. The empirical chapters are the most interesting for readers not steeped in IR theory debates. I found Chapter 4, “Excluding Women in the Society of Civilized States,” especially provocative. It shows convincingly that the widespread assumption that political empowerment of women originated in European democracies is just plain wrong. The author argues that rather than welcoming to women, liberalism and secularism—the building blocks of democratization in Europe and the United States—were explicitly and intentionally based on the exclusion of women. “Enlightened” democrats argued that it was the removal of women from all forms of politics and placement in a “separate sphere” of domesticity that was the hallmark of an advanced or “civilized” state. For them, only “primitive” societies allowed women to participate in councils with men.
Having linked the norms of women's political exclusion to the hierarchy of civilized/uncivilized states in debates over democracy, Towns then traces the processes of inclusion over the last century in three chapters. The expansion of suffrage took most of the century to spread and reveals four different patterns. It started at the outskirts of the core of “civilized” states, for example, Australia, New Zealand, and Finland, from the 1890s to 1910s. (Not mentioned is the similar pattern of suffrage in the United States: Only the states of the Far West periphery adopted votes for women in the same period.) Later, core states followed suit, but it took until the 1940s to complete. Towns finds a tremendous shift in norms about civilization during the suffrage campaigns as votes for women switched from being “primitive” to “civilized.” Women's suffrage then spread to socialist movements, Latin American states, and African and Asian states, and leaders in each group offered different justifications. For the socialist states, activists dropped the idea that suffrage was a feature of bourgeois society best avoided in the socialist revolution and linked this right for women to the larger emancipation of workers. Pan American suffrage debates beginning in the 1930s saw suffrage as a step toward advancement and away from backwardness. Finally, the fourth wave among the independence movements in Africa and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s saw suffrage as liberation from colonialism, tying it to the role of women in the precolonial past.
The pattern of adoption of NWMs is quite different from the long road to worldwide women's suffrage. Nearly all governments established machineries during the 10 years of the United Nations Women's Decade (1975–85). Having a state office to promote equity and the status of women within the UN context was a norm of development. But Towns discovered two hierarchies associated with this approach. First, the UN argued that countries where women had not achieved equality had to have a mechanism. Officials concluded that the socialist countries already showed ample evidence of equality of women in politics, economy, family law, and education and so did not push them. The UN expected the Western capitalist countries with more inequality, on the other hand, to adopt machineries (a call picked up by the European Union later for both Western and Eastern Europe). The other stratification was between the First and Third Worlds. Since the Third World countries saw modernization promoted by the First World countries as oppressive to women, the UN argued that NWMs must be created in the context of each country and should not emulate the very states that exported the inequality.
Finally, Towns links the proliferation of laws requiring a minimum number of women in legislatures to a variety of different norms and inequalities. The idea that quotas are a Western invention is countered by evidence that few countries in Europe or North America have legal quotas. The lack of interest in quotas, especially in the United States, provided a way for other countries to claim quotas as a good thing and contrast their democratic impact as superior to the low representation of women that persists in the United States, Britain, and France. In Latin America, some justify quotas in order to reach democratic ideals of equality and justice; at the same time, the argument that having more women in government promotes economic growth is widespread. For many, especially in major global governance organizations such as the World Bank, quotas overcome tradition and promote a modern market democracy.
The book makes an important contribution by bringing suffrage, NWM, and sex quota policies together for analysis on a global basis. The empirical chapters are very well done, and the author's constructivist approach that focuses on processes and historical contexts overlaps nicely with comparative studies. The discussion of IR theory, however, limits the reach of the book because it appears as part of a dialogue among a subset of IR scholars; there is little effort to place the theoretical discussion in the broader context of political theory or even situate it in the IR field. On the plus side, the author is aware of the need to pay attention to conceptualization, offering definitions of key terms. At the same time, these definitions tend to be narrow, reflecting the narrowness of the theoretical perspective. Finally, there is little integration between the theoretical chapters and the empirical chapters. Theoretical frameworks are not used here to develop propositions to be answered by empirical research. Rather, the empirical analysis is set up to demonstrate the author's chosen framework. This approach means that the book is presented as an argument in the midst of an ongoing IR debate, which detracts from the contribution of the empirical analysis in the book to a larger literature on women and states.
