If ever there was a perfect time for interrogating the relevant benefits of the “women and politics” approach to studying American politics, it is right now. Scholars who initially thought that current women and politics research would benefit greatly from Hillary Clinton's historic campaign now face a bonus set of data points when analyzing the 2008 presidential campaign. How did Alaska Governor Sarah Palin come to be the first woman nominated for vice president by the Republican Party in the United States? How do we explain Palin's appeal to a significant number of women in the time since her surprise selection by presidential candidate John McCain? What does the nomination of Palin mean for the future of feminist politics, and of gender politics more generally?

Luckily, scholars interested in these questions have Righting Feminism and Political Women and American Democracy to assist them. These two timely and well-crafted discussions exemplify the “women and politics” approach that has sought to treat women as a relevant population for most traditional conundrums in American political science. Their efforts indicate an intriguing, complex set of successes and failures of the second-wave women's movement in the United States. Together, these books can ground us in future examinations of the significance of Sarah Palin's nomination for gender politics writ large, the better to understand the challenges of gender that still confront American politics.

Righting Feminism, Ronnee Schreiber's convincing and innovative study, might lead us to conclude that the nomination of Palin consolidates the influence of a largely unknown and growing movement of conservative women only recently identified by the mainstream media and among national-level Democratic activists. Schreiber tracks two major conservative women's organizations—the socially conservative Concerned Women of America (CWA) and the economically conservative Independent Women's Forum (IWF)—as quintessential organizations within a different kind of women's movement in the United States (p. 5). Ably executed, her book contributes to a growing literature on conservative women that rightly stands beside a long-standing scholarly literature on liberal and progressive feminist women's organizations.

The centerpiece of Schreiber's work is 20 in-depth interviews conducted with the leadership of CWA and IWF, which illuminate an overlooked segment of the female population in the literature. In her qualitative analysis of the organizations' positions on domestic violence, sexual harassment, and work–life balance, she identifies three dominant issue frames: antifeminist, women's interests, and conservative ideology (p. 58).

What is perhaps most ironic about the findings presented here is these organizations' mastery of feminist tools to achieve antifeminist political outcomes. First, Schreiber describes how the CWA and IWF use the identity politics–driven strategy of “femball”—the overt celebration of women organizing as women—to promote conservative political change based on a backlash against identity politics (p. 43). Second, she discovers that conservative women unabashedly embraced strategic essentialism long before Gayatri Spivak popularized the term, noting that anti-ERA activist Phyllis Schafly was one of the earliest to understand the effectiveness of having a woman lead ant-feminist political organizing (pp. 22, 47–48). These two findings lead to several provocative conclusions with implications for future scholarship.

First, one could conclude that feminists (radical and liberal ones in particular) are now victims of their own second-wave identity politics success: Schreiber documents how both IWF and CWA acknowledge gender's salience using terms of debate originally set by feminists (p. 43), even as they simultaneously promote antifeminist issue frames in public.

The second provocative conclusion to be drawn from Schreiber's analysis is that most mainstream feminist organizations continue to overlook the growing strength of this constituency at their own peril. Reading her book against the backdrop of Sarah Palin's historic nomination, it is clear that the constituency of women Schreiber studies have been given a national platform—McCain's choice was made in recognition of one of the growing constituencies of antifeminist organizing among white working and middle-class women of all ages. As well, CWA and IWF leaders have vast political experience and reach deriving from their experiences in the George W. Bush administration. Schreiber traces the origin of feminist disengagement with conservative women to a deeply dismissive notion that these women are mere “mouthpieces” of conservative men who have no thoughts of their own. But she correctly argues that taking these women too lightly overlooks their appeal to moderate women. These moderate women usually believe in the most mainstream of women's right, such as protection from domestic violence, and yet fail to recognize how the CWA and IWF may challenge the ability of women to be protected from such harms in a substantive way.

Schreiber insufficiently considers the ways that this deeply dismissive attitude on behalf of feminists enables conservative women to outflank them. Some possible questions for future research emerge. To begin with, while she echoes the conclusion reached by Susan Marshall in a separate study, that conservative women's use of feminist tools is “co-optation” (p. 125), the political implications of such liberal feminist “success” are left uninterrogated despite her mild recognition of some frames as “reminiscent of feminist critiques about sterilization abuse” (p. 102) and strategically selected for their mainstream appeal (p. 105).

While it is important to recognize the infiltration of gender analysis into conservative movements in the United States, what are the political implications for preexisting feminist groups unused to sharing such gender-centric discursive power? Have feminists recognized their knee-jerk dismissal of conservative women, and if so, have they developed strategies to reclaim the discourse from the right? These questions, if pursued in future research, would join studies like Dara Strolovitch's Affirmative Advocacy (2007) to further enrich the area of social justice movements with more contemporary considerations.

These issues come into greater focus in the anthology Political Women and American Democracy. Reflecting upon the past 30 years of research, the book covers a refreshingly wide range of topics centered on a single broad and important question: “What do we know about women, politics, and democracy in the United States” (p. ix)?

In featuring a range of answers to this question, the volume also sheds light on the challenges that the Sarah Palin phenomenon presents to a feminist politics. What, for instance, as we to make of conservative women if we take Gretchen Ritter's point seriously regarding American political development scholars' ability to “locate and assess shifts in the treatment of gendered roles and relations” (p. 16)? On the one hand, we could overlook them as conservative in the doctrinal sense—anachronistic remnants of a time when men and women had separate spheres. This allows us to use the language contemporary that feminists have often used—“false consciousness,” the aforementioned “mouthpiece for men,” “token,” and the like. This characterization seems to resonate with the way that Schreiber describes the feminist organizational response. Yet if we consider that these women are using the gains of feminism to preserve that element of choice so fundamental to liberal feminism, then we must grapple with their claims as legitimate in the sense that they are political and deserve serious discussion in the marketplace of ideas. In her chapter “Women's Movements and Women in Movements,” Lee Ann Banaszak echoes this point, noting with alarm that feminists, by “framing issues in ways that lack cultural resonance … trade the risk of remaining unnoticed and being on the outskirts of society for maintaining radical ideas” (p. 89). Taken together, these chapters seem to support a stronger call for direct discursive engagement by gender scholars and activists with the claims of conservative women.

Taking this second option requires us to take more seriously the ways in which the conservative political mobilization resonates with millions of women and gives voice to their fears and aspirations. The chapters by Ritter and Beth Reingold both grapple with what “representing women” really means. For Ritter, this is tied to the full extension of democratic institutions (p. 19). As Reingold and Kathy Dolan note in separate chapters, the skewed partisanship of the female elected officials population has forced women and politics scholarship to reconsider whether scholars can definitively argue that there is only one way to act “for women.”

Citing Debra Dodson, Reingold identifies at least one dimension along which women's representation could be categorized: feminist and antifeminist. The definition of women's representation, then, would consist solely of “a conscious effort to forge responsive connections with women and women's groups” (p. 137). Yet Suzanne Dovi cautions us against such reflexive, lowest-common-denominator approaches to studying the role of gender in political phenomena, noting, “Those who study the representation of women must attend to the ways in which female representatives can perpetuate unjust inequalities” (p. 159). Echoing Noelle Norton's concerns about the contingent quality of empirical claims based on skewed partisanship trends among female elected officials, Dovi asserts: “Political scientists also need to differentiate between female representatives as inside players, who can potentially transform the political system and female representatives who are merely tokens. The election of female legislators ‘does not guarantee their influence over policies that differentially affect the genders’” (Norton quoted in Dovi, p. 160).

As I write, Governor Sarah Palin has just become former Governor Palin in yet another unexpected move from a truly unconventional female candidate. Scholars looking to explain Palin's ongoing, simultaneous popularity and infamy among women and men would do well to begin their empirical literature reviews with Righting Feminism and Political Women in American Democracy. Is her popularity due solely to the increased influence of national conservative women's organizations, as Schreiber's analysis might suggest? Is her infamy among her fellow female elected officials based solely on the overwhelming Democratic affiliation among said officials, as Dovi or Norton might predict? Both books send us beyond these mere character studies, to be sure, as they contribute greatly to the content of our knowledge in American politics. Graduate students and faculty looking for strong reviews of the women and politics subfield and directions for future research will turn to these two works for years to come.