Political discourse has proven a worthy source of material for scholarly investigation into power, politics, and policymaking. Policy scholars have frequently used discourse to explore issue framing, media content, and policy decisions (e.g., Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones, Agendas and Instability in American Politics, 1993; Roger W. Cobb and Charles D. Elder, Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda Building, 1983; Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox, 1997; Nayda Terkildsen, Frauke I. Schnell, and Cristina Ling, “Interest Groups, the Media, and Policy Debate Formation: An Analysis of Message Structure, Rhetoric, and Source Cues,” Political Communication 15 [1998]: 45–61). As a tool for investigating abortion debates (e.g., Myra Marx Ferree, William Anthony Gamson, Jurgen Gerhards, and Dieter Rucht, Shaping Abortion Discourse: Democracy and the Public Sphere in Germany and the U.S., 2002) or sex education (e.g., Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the U.S., 2002), discourse also reveals the gendered dimensions of contemporary American politics. At the same time, this insight is not lost on advocates and opinion leaders: “Words are … bullets” in the culture wars, says James Dobson, founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family (quoted in Irvine 2002, 73).
Expanding beyond policy studies, Molly Mayhead and Brenda Devoe Marshall have taken on the ambitious task of trying to assess the cumulative impact of women's discourse on contemporary politics. Focusing on 39 pioneering and contemporary female officeholders in U.S. politics, the authors analyze the ideographs and rhetoric of these women to say something about the transformation of political discourse and politics. Tracing first the contributions of a number of congressional women and a handful of female governors from the twentieth century, they argue that women's discourse in the twenty-first century contributes to an increasingly “gender-neutral rhetoric that occupies an androgynous in-between space” (p. 18). Their subjects possess the necessary standing (voice in the media) to generate data for the analysis, and so the book is a timely contribution.
Mayhead and Marshall have written a book that is a pleasure to read for its nicely detailed personal narratives. The biographical details cover some of the usual suspects (e.g., Rep. Jeanette Rankin [R-MT] and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton [D-NY]), as well as lesser known congresswomen and governors (e.g., Rep. Diana DeGette [D-CO] and Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle). The major chapters are organized around women occupying the same institutional space—the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and state capitols. The narratives are accessible and highly readable.
The authors build their theoretical argument from the second-wave feminists' rallying assertion: “The personal is political” (p. 5). Their theoretical argument, however, is more complex than the simple claim of the importance of acknowledging the political dimensions of the private sphere. Borrowing from the work of Edward Soja (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996), Henri Lefebvre (Key Writings, 2003), and James Flanagan (“Ancient Perceptions of Space/Perceptions of Ancient Space,” Semeia 87 [1999]: 15–43), Mayhead and Marshall posit a spatial terrain of women's discourse that simultaneously occupies the “First Space” of women's lived empirical experiences, the “Second Space” of conceived and legitimized social hierarchies, and the “Third Space” of the marginalized and the silenced (pp. 12–13). They argue that women in politics occupy an “in-between space” and contribute a discourse, which simultaneously gives voice to women's lived reality, breaks the silence covering the private sphere, and helps to transform social and political hierarchies: “We suggest that by the mid-nineteenth century women's political discourse began to frame this ‘new’ political site as a more androgynous arena in which both masculine and feminine views of the world could be heard and acted upon. Moreover this reconfiguration is transformative, not simply integrative…. And, we argue, this both/and perspective promises to be the salient feature of women's political discourse in the twenty-first century” (p. 13). This bold argument is worthy of further investigation and gives readers much to contemplate.
Unfortunately, the authors' conclusions may be more ambitiously stated than their data can support. By their own acknowledgment, the analysis of women's discourse is handicapped by a lack of available source material, and they note the uneven and sporadic record available among contemporary public officials, not to mention the illusiveness of women no longer in office. Relying mostly on statements submitted to the Congressional Record, as well as speeches and other documents posted to the Web pages of women officeholders, Mayhead and Marshall describe their data as “fragmented samples” and their analysis as piecing “together bits of glass in the broad mosaic of political discourse” (p. 211). Further complicating the sampled discourse is the reality that the featured women's source material, as for all political figures, is highly edited and self-consciously crafted.
I have two relatively minor quarrels with the authors' analysis. First, I would have liked a further explanation of the analytical strategy for determining the important ideographs of the women featured in the book. The authors present these ideographs and bolster them with illustrations from the sampled speech, but they give little insight into how the dominant ideographs were discerned. My own preferences run toward the kind of empirical content analysis supplemented by qualitative interviews used by Ferree, Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht (2002) to assess abortion discourse, but other approaches are possible. A methodological appendix would have been appreciated.
Second, and related to the first, I would have liked to see some acknowledgment of the empirical work done on women's political discourse (e.g., Dianne Bystrom and Lynda Lee Kaid, “Are Women Candidates Transforming Campaign Communication?,” in Cindy Simon Rosenthal, ed., Women Transforming Congress, 2002; Kim Fridkin Kahn, “The Distorted Mirror: Press Coverage of Women Candidates for Statewide Office,” Journal of Politics 56 [1994]: 154–73; Lyn Kathlene, “Power and Influence in State Legislature Policymaking: The Interaction of Gender and Position in Committee Hearing Debates,” American Political Science Review 99 [no. 3, 1994]: 560–76; Lyn Kathlene, “Alternative Views of Crime: Legislative Policymaking in Gendered Terms,” Journal of Politics 57 [1995]: 696–723; Katherine Cramer Walsh, “Enlarging Representation: Women Bringing Marginalized Perspectives to Floor Debate in the House of Representatives,” in Cindy Simon Rosenthal, ed., Women Transforming Congress, 2002; among others). These scholars and others would have bolstered the basic argument made by Mayhead and Marshall, while providing additional glue to their mosaic.
In conclusion, this book makes an important argument about the contributions of women's discourse and relates the discourse of a diverse group of contemporary female officeholders in an interesting way. More definitive support for the authors' assertions will have to await a more comprehensive and systematic analysis. Finally, in perhaps their most important recommendation, the authors encourage twenty-first-century female politicians to contribute to the development of an archive to capture and preserve women's political discourse for the use of future scholars, students, and practitioners. Such an archive would contribute to a “culture of mentoring” as well, according to the authors (p. 211). This recommendation warrants serious attention and action.
