This work centers on six questions addressing the central theme of how “W” stands for women, although the scope is certainly not limited to the Bush presidency. These questions include 1) How do we analyze Bush's stance on women's issues when considered in relationship to feminist politics; gender, racial, and class inequity; and broader and critical definitions of security? 2) How do Bush's words and deeds reproduce hierarchies—between “us” and “them,” between the compassionate and the needy? 3) Who are the real beneficiaries and who are the real victims of Bush's policies on women, gender, and security? How are these policies gendered, sexualized, raced, and classed? 4) How does Bush's political philosophy relate to and transform conservative, and especially conservative religious, ideology? 5) How has the Bush presidency reshaped popular understandings of feminism, gender, and security? 6) How should feminists respond?

The book consists of ten essays including an introduction by the editors. The essays are grouped into four sections highlighting “Compassionate Patriarchy,” “Bush's Masculinities,” “Gendered War Logics at Home and Abroad,” and “Feminist Responses.” The authors are primarily academics in political science, history, and gender studies. The book project grew out of a Women and Politics Pre-Conference for the American Political Science Association annual meeting in 2005. The themes are broadly theoretical and address ideologies much larger than the campaign slogan suggested by the title.

As indicated by the questions listed above, the authors center their critiques of the Bush administration on its emphasis on security and how its security rhetoric and practices have appropriated certain women's rights perspectives and challenged broader-based feminism and, in return, how feminists can confront these dominating theories. The theoretical perspectives analyzed emphasize the concepts of compassion, democracy, and rights in the context of national security and the authors challenge the conservative approach to each of these ideas. The Bush focus on compassion in its AIDS policy, for example, highlighted women as mothers rather than as individuals with their own rights, promoting policies that contributor Karen Zivi argues threatened to actually hurt women as it attempted to save their children. Some of the essays take a wider view, focusing more generally on critiques of conservative masculinity and patriarchy. The authors contest the security agenda and rhetoric of the Bush administration both from an internal national lens and from a global perspective on women's rights. They simultaneously critique neoconservative and neoliberal ideas in their analyses. Interwoven into these essays as well are connections to various major historical theorists such Jean Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes.

The “W Stands for Women” slogan was first used as a theme for the Bush campaign in the 2000 election in an attempt to counter the large gender gap in support for his candidacy and was repeated with an underlying security message in 2004. These essays do not engage in a narrow challenge to the use of this slogan in the two campaigns. Nor does the overarching theme of the volume center on a limited critique of the policies of George W. Bush's two administrations. Rather, the authors concentrate their theoretical analyses on the broader conservative movement ideology aimed at privileging heterosexual masculinity and dismantling activist state policies that have promoted greater freedom and equality for women as advanced by the women's rights movement in the United States. So, one should not consider the book's frame of reference to be editorials against an organization now gone, but, instead, as Ferguson and Marso highlight in their introduction, a concern with what the Bush presidency has represented as “a new configuration of gender politics whose significance and impact will extend far beyond” his eight years in office (p. 7). With its framing of security combined with the promotion of a more general Christian conservative philosophy regarding private and public realms, this administration has affected how many Americans think about major issues and how they look upon governmental action. The editors of this volume contend that support for the ideas and policies of the Bush administration among significant groups of Americans (and the institutionalization of those policies) will make it difficult to reverse course and for feminists to find resonance for greater gender equality within the nation. Although the title of the book suggests a focus on the Bush presidency and its specific policies, the essays actually take a much broader sweep regarding how the concept of gender challenges the larger conservative, neoconservative, and neoliberal philosophies that have so dominated our politics and shows how these perspectives hurt women rather than “standing” for them.

This new configuration of gender politics consists of a narrow promotion of political and economic rights for women. Some women can achieve positions of influence as exemplified by the few strong women with whom Bush surrounded himself in the Executive Office. However, at the same time, the administration used the more traditional Laura Bush in her role as the First Lady to be the point person in articulating freedom for women in Afghanistan. This limited focus on women's ability to achieve is overwhelmed by a philosophy that characterizes men as the dominant protectors of the weaker sex within traditional family settings. This is the “new politics of gender” the Bush administration has shaped. It consists of a set of policies and rhetoric that purports to promote more equal status and greater freedom for women (because the Bush doctrine on security will protect them) while actually limiting women's freedom to be active agents in their own destinies and dismantles many of the hard won gains of the women's rights movement. It does so not by repealing various public laws barring sex discrimination or programs promoting achievement, but by failing to provide resources to continue their vigorous implementation.

Key to the book perhaps is the 6th question the work addresses, that is, how feminists should respond to this “new politics of gender” to further the feminist agenda at home and abroad. Michaele Ferguson's essay takes a domestic focus and Lori Marso's an international one. These two essays challenge the “new politics of gender” from two angles: a feminist co-optation of Bush “women's rights” frames to show their contradiction and an approach to the concept of freedom that takes into account context rather than a narrow liberal democratic perspective respecting women's views of freedom in Iraq and Afghanistan. Michaele Ferguson argues that the rhetorical construction of a chivalrous respect for women and a discourse of democratic peace distinguish the Bush administration's framing of women's rights issues in relation to national security. The Bush regime's rhetoric feminizes security by co-opting feminism. Ferguson believes that women's rights activists can and should in turn co-opt the Bush rhetoric for feminist ends with a focus on security for women at home, for example, that would include monetary support for the Violence Against Women Act's administration and questioning if the United States is truly democratic given, among other things, women's lesser representation in political leadership positions. If we are to center our international security assertiveness on the rhetoric of feminist ideals then we need to practice it at home, Ferguson asserts. In her essay, Lori Marso stresses that freedom is embedded within community and, therefore, our liberal democratic tenets are not perceived as helpful to women in other cultures. More attention must be given to pluralism in seeking to improve upon the lives of women in other cultures. Mary Hawkesworth adds to the ideas of a feminist response by calling to our attention the fact that global feminism is alive and well contrary to what the neoliberals would have us believe. Global feminists are undertaking many projects aimed at achieving true equality for women.

Clearly the essays that make up this book are complex and the authors attack the Bush presidency and its ideology from a variety of directions and are wide-ranging in the lenses they apply to the implications of the security focus of contemporary politics evidenced by the Bush administration. They are all thought-provoking and should move us out of any complacency that we might have about women's rights being taken seriously in an insecure world. Some chapters focus more on masculinity and only indirectly on women's rights, but they all contribute to the general challenge to the conservatives' seeming appropriation of feminism. However, a summary chapter that linked together the wide-ranging theses of the various chapters on the conservative security appropriation of a women's rights agenda might have been helpful to readers. The lack of such a concluding chapter leaves one pondering the extent to which the six questions posed in the book's introduction have been addressed in its essays. Some of the items are only given marginal attention, such as class and race issues. But, the essays are sophisticated in their arguments and responses to the “new politics of gender.” The authors give the readers much to cogitate, responses to make to this conservative challenge, and material to use in classrooms to shake up students and question their tendency to submit to protection in this insecure world, as Iris Marion Young suggests in her essay in this volume.