American political development (APD) as a field has made its way into the forefront of political science literature. One of its most important assumptions is that the best way to understand the present is by locating the roots of current policies and politics in the historical contexts of the past. Suffice it to say, this does not mean that “history repeats itself,” but rather that the only way to understand what happens today is to connect the dots between previous and current political phenomena. In this way, it becomes more possible to discern the developmental paths that define the parameters available for contemporary and future political analysis and action.

The field of APD has produced remarkable scholarship challenging the most basic assumptions about what makes the American state tick. Initially, the canon defined by Alexis de Tocqueville, Gunnar Myrdal, and Louis Hartz argued that the development of the American state was based upon a liberal consensus that American political institutions should treat all individuals as equal “in spite of” ascriptive group differences, such as their class, race, or sex. Hence, contrary examples such as slavery, to say the least, which violate the consensus assumption, but are viewed as anomalies or bumps in the liberal road that need to be removed in order to continue the liberal “individual equality” project ideologically and historically. Suffice it to say that this consensus view was overturned by the pioneering work of Karen Orren (Belated Feudalism, 1992) and Rogers Smith (Civic Ideals, 1997).

Orren, focusing on class, argued that the United States was never the liberal Lockean state of nature depicted by Hartz, but instead a location for feudal principles empowering masters over servants that became transformed into the dominance of employers over laborers via the American judicial system's dependence upon common law as inherited from England. She credits this all-but-intractable presence of feudal principles as an explanation for why labor organization and the politicalization of working-class rights in the American state was stalled throughout most of American political history. Smith, focusing on race in his book, expanded upon Orren's thesis by arguing that what explains the historical lag in implementing principles of individual equality for ascriptive groups stems from more than entrenched feudal remnants. Rather, as he argues, in addition to the liberal tradition, the American state also embodies an American ascriptive tradition that is just as deeply ingrained as is the liberal one. Thus, as an examination of the development of equal rights for racially subordinated groups reveals, American political development is best understood as a competition between the liberal tradition and the ascriptivist one, where the former prevails over the latter.

Enter Gretchen Ritter and her focus on gender and APD in her remarkable new book. Orren and Smith are recognized as major figures in the field of political science in general and APD in particular. Their award-winning books set a high standard, indeed, for anyone attempting to join their illustrious company. However, join is what someone was going to have to do, because neither Orren nor Smith focus their analysis on gender. Now, however, at last, we have Ritter to thank for not only stepping up to plate but hitting a home run. Her book, in short, is a masterpiece to be added to the APD canon, completing the class, race, gender trilogy as launched by Orren and Smith.

Rather than critiquing liberalism historically for failing to implement principles of individual equality à la Orren and Smith, Ritter instead identifies a major problem with liberalism as being its failure to take into account a positive depiction of ascriptive group difference. This is an especially serious failure in the case of women because, as she notes, “women still face resistance to the idea that their sex does not matter to their civic membership” (p. 3). In particular, courts have tended to view “women to be irreducibly different from men” (p. 259). Consequently, as Ritter argues, women's ascriptive group difference has been tenaciously retained in many policy areas. This in itself, however, is not the major problem. Rather, it is that the constitutional retention of women's ascriptive group difference has not served to expand their civic membership but instead to limit it. The mechanism by means of which the constitutional order uses women's ascriptive group difference to limit their civic membership has been the constitutional doctrine of privacy, a legal precept that is associated not only with gender difference but also with gender dependence (p. 293).

That the privacy doctrine embodies gender difference and gender dependence signifies, for Ritter, the way in which the privacy doctrine continues antiquated, feudal norms of status hierarchies in new forms. For example, she views the privacy doctrine as incorporating norms of coverture, the common law tradition that viewed married women as subsumed by the legal identities of their husbands, and, hence, as dependents who were “covered” by their husband's authority and their husband's provision of economic resources. One of the many intriguing ways Ritter explores this premise is by reference to abortion rights as launched by the 1973 Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. Roe v. Wade established women's right to choose an abortion on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment's Due Process Clause, which provides for the right of privacy to make decisions about one's reproductive options without interference from the state. In Ritter's analysis, Roe v. Wade illustrates how the privacy doctrine, as applied to abortion rights, reincorporates principles of women's dependency upon authority figures and how women's privacy is never defined in terms of an autonomous individuality. As she puts it, “women never appear in it [Roe v. Wade] as full persons before the law” (p. 278).

To bolster her claim that it is coverture premises of women's relational connection and dependency upon others that become re-encoded in the privacy doctrine, Ritter points to the Supreme Court's assumption in Roe v. Wade that “the pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy” (p. 261). In addition, she spends considerable time in her analysis of abortion rights emphasizing that it is the physician who has the ultimate authority to make the decision about whether a woman may have an abortion (p. 278). It is in her analysis of abortion rights, however, that I think another issue emerges that deserves more attention than it receives in her book, namely, the way ascriptive gender difference is associated with a necessary type of labor, reproductive labor, in contrast to all other forms of ascriptive group difference, which have no such attachment to a specific type of labor.

Despite her reliance upon Orren's work, Ritter does not center her analysis on labor as a foundation of the state, as does Orren. Hence, Ritter misses the significance of how not all ascriptive group differences are the same. Thus, she misinterprets, in my opinion, the meaning of the Supreme Court's assertion that a pregnant woman cannot be isolated in her privacy. To this reader, such a statement is not evidence of the Court's incorporation of coverture principles of relational necessity into a privacy doctrine of women's reproductive rights. Rather, it is evidence of the necessity for reproductive labor to occur on the basis of relationships between people in the first place. This is because no woman can be pregnant unless a fertilized ovum, and later a fetus, attaches itself to her uterus and remains there. From a biological perspective, therefore, pregnancy is socially constructed as a condition involving necessarily a woman, and something—or someone—else, namely, the fertilized ovum, embryo, fetus, or unborn child. Such a recognition on the part of the Court does not derive from coverture but from the failure, thus far, of reproductive technology to invent test tube wombs where fetuses can grow and develop without biologically involving women—or men, for that matter.

Similarly, recognition that a physician must agree to perform an abortion if a woman is to have one does not invoke, in my opinion, coverture principles as much as it does the simple recognition that all physicians must consent to do the operations they perform. In this respect, pregnant women are no more dependent upon the consent of physicians to perform abortions than are any other patients dependent upon the consent of physicians to perform operations.

Thus, my major reservation with Ritter's analysis is simply that she attributes to the privacy doctrine too much causal significance when it comes to understanding what did not get accomplished on the feminist agenda and what remains to be done. The privacy doctrine is crucial and brilliantly analyzed, but there is a broader view that her concentration on the privacy doctrine tends to block out. That view, in my opinion, entails recognition of the way that gender, in contrast to all other types of ascriptive group differences, is associated with a form of labor—reproductive labor—that is not merely desired, valued, and celebrated but that is absolutely necessary for the continuation of society and the state, whatever the form of government. The relational necessity of reproductive labor and its association with gender is another dimension that is important for explaining the development of women's civic membership within a liberal constitutional community. This deserves as much serious attention as does the use of the privacy doctrine by the courts to adjudicate women's location in the American state.

That said, however, the creative and analytic strengths of Ritter's book are many. From the perspective of theories of citizenship and political development, the author gives new meaning to T. H. Marshall's tripartite typology of civil, political, and social citizenship. Far from a linear trajectory, Ritter shows how, in the case of gender, each type of inclusion in society and the state influences and defines the other. In particular, she explicates the dilemma posed by the category of gender for the development of a constitutional order premised upon the individual equality of all people. Yes, of course, the norm of equality can be applied to women, as it can and has been applied to other groups targeted by political discrimination as based on their class or race. However, when the liberal ideal of equality is applied to women, an analysis of APD reveals limitations in the case of gender from which class and race were spared. As Ritter argues, even while individual equality can be extended to women, such a view is added on to women's relational identities as keepers of the home and as individuals who play important, positive roles in socializing children and caring for husbands in order for an American republic to thrive. Thus, in contrast to labor and racial hierarchies, there is an intractable and positive difference associated with women that remains even in the midst of the most vehement claims and advances that promote women's liberation from sex difference identities.

In this way, Ritter explains in her thorough and insightful analysis the basic paradox of APD as seen through the lens of gender: How can a nation that is founded upon a principle of individual equality nevertheless retain within its realm a positive affirmation of group difference in general and women's sex group difference in particular? Prior to this book, ascriptive group difference was all but assumed to be a negative feature of the American state, whether in terms of working-class discrimination (Orren) or in terms of racial hierarchies (Smith). What we learn by reading Ritter's book is that gender reveals the positive way ascriptive group difference can, and must, be incorporated into even the most liberal of political systems, such as that of the United States.

Once armed with the revelation that even in the most universally conceived liberal systems there must be room for positive group difference, at least in the case of women's sex group difference, our understanding of constitutional design radically changes. While the Equal Protection Clause, for example, works for race and class, it is less successful in its application to gender difference, since the premise that women only have identities as individuals who are the same as men is less untenable for sex difference than for class and race difference. This is because to establish such a claim would deny the positive value, if not necessity, of women's maternal roles in bearing children in order for society to continue, and of women's disproportionate contributions in caring for others once they are born.

While Ritter seeks to distance herself from the “ethic of care” literature in her analysis (p. 313), she does develop what she terms the need to embody civic membership in the political community in order to generate what she calls a “vision of public civic membership” as based on community. This is a civic membership that emphasizes “access, inclusion, and voice” (p. 315). In so doing, she has turned Orren and Smith on their heads. Rather than purging the American state of vestiges of feudalism, defined as ascriptive group statuses that impeded the development of an American liberal state, Ritter argues instead that it is precisely the embodiment of ascriptive group differences that give to the public sphere of governance a foundation of community inclusive of justice and political participation. In so doing, she has contributed a landmark study of APD that takes its place among the best and the most provocative.

In addition to the big picture that Ritter's book inscribes on our minds, there are many subtopics that also will leave their mark upon academic scholarship for decades to come. Her analysis of the Nineteenth Amendment is a jewel among many—a lucid and brilliant exposition about the broad ramifications of this addition to the Constitution in terms of the way in which it set the stage for subsequent development (or lack thereof) of women's rights.

In addition, I found Ritter's discussion of federalism, as well as her connection of the historical dots in the development of the Equal Rights Amendment, a much needed boost to our ability to see crucial pieces of legislation in their proper trajectories. In the case of the ERA, for example, it is quite common to find renditions of its origins in the Progressive era in the form of Alice Paul's initiative, and there is excellent scholarship on the ERA for contemporary periods. However, when it comes to the 1940s, one would be hard pressed to cite much literature on women's equal rights policies in contrast to those focusing on equalizing rights between blacks and whites, particularly in the context of Harry Truman's civil rights initiatives. Yet, from Ritter's superb book we learn that alongside efforts to desegregate on the basis of race, so, too, political activity was directed at procuring equal rights for women. The fact that the former eventually prevailed in contrast to the latter contributes to our understanding of gender equality and how our conceptions of gender equality run into trouble when framed solely in terms of claims that women are the “same” as men.

The Constitution as Social Design, therefore, is a must read for those interested in APD, the development of women's rights, and the constitutional foundation of the American state.