The status of women in political science remains a vexed question, along with the status of feminist research in political science. There is a continuing need to apply a gender lens to the discipline itself, its hierarchies of knowledge, and its preference for abstracting from the lived experience of the political and social order. This has been an ongoing theme of Joni Lovenduski's life and work, illustrated here by articles and book chapters published over a period of some three decades.
The European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) has already published a Festschrift dedicated to her (Campbell and Childs Reference Campbell and Childs2014). At its initiative, Lovenduski then selected articles and book chapters for this book and organized them under four main headings, Political Representation, Political Parties, Gender and Public Policy, and Gendering the Political Science Agenda. The aim is to provide answers to two questions: “Does political science need feminism?” and “Does feminism need political science?”
On the first question, Lovenduski has been a long-time critic of positivism and methods-driven research that impedes the raising of important feminist questions. As she says on the first page, “For me, political science is the systematic study of politics, a project that is impossible without feminism” (1). Political science has been too inclined to overlook the gender order underlying and reproduced by political institutions and movements. It has been much more resistant to self-examination and reflexivity than cognate social science disciplines such as sociology and much less open to considering gender as a key ordering principle.
In a 1998 essay originally published in the Annual Review of Political Science, Lovenduski reiterates her criticism of the resistance of political science to feminism: “The preference for parsimonious models, elegant, slender hypotheses, and measurable data are elements of political science that are inhospitable to the study of gender” (327). The preference for abstraction from political life is often coupled with resistance to the normative aspects of feminist political science and its desire to contribute to social and political change.
Early on, Lovenduski became convinced of the crucial relationship between the status of women in political science and the capacity of the discipline to absorb feminist critique and knowledge. She became a critical actor, whose commitments and networks helped bring about institutional change in the profession in the United Kingdom (UK) and beyond. She was one of the founders of the Women and Politics Group of the UK Political Studies Association (PSA) and was responsible for the inaugural PSA surveys of the status of women in the profession. She was also a founder of the Women and Politics Standing Group of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR), which in 2007 became the ECPR Standing Group on Gender and Politics. In both cases this feminist institution-building has been sustained over time and has brought about significant change in the national and regional organization of political science.
In addition to her work within the profession, which included periods on the executive of the PSA and ECPR, Lovenduski undertook research on the role of women in the broader political system. This included her important work with Pippa Norris on legislative recruitment, the role of parties as gatekeepers to political office, the obstacles presented by supply and demand factors, and pathways to change. The work on political parties and representation is full of sharp observation, including the warning not to take at face value self-reported claims by women politicians to represent women's interests—any more than Labour claims to represent the interests of the poor would be accepted without demonstrable evidence (56–57). She continued such work on political parties and legislative recruitment in partnership with younger scholars such as Sarah Childs and Rosie Campbell. It had a significant applied dimension as did her work on gender equality policy, which in this collection includes coauthored work on domestic violence, pornography, abortion (with Joyce Outshoorn), and urban policy.
Lovenduski herself says it is relatively easy to show why political science needs feminism. It is harder to make the case for why feminism needs political science. Interest in power might be something contributed by the discipline, along with the insights deriving from new institutionalism and the theory of political representation. As feminist political science has become increasingly professionalized, it has developed feminist versions of these disciplinary frameworks, often deploying mixed-methods approaches. At the same time feminist scholarship has continued to engage in cross-disciplinary borrowing in areas such as discourse analysis, gender performance, and social movement studies, despite the “perceived career penalty attached to multi-disciplinary work” (304).
The book would have benefited from editing to remove the typographical and spelling errors. For example, significant figures like Carole Pateman, Kate Millett, Carmen Callil, and Myra Marx Ferree get their names misspelled at least once, and Joyce Outshoorn appears twice as Outschoorn. There are also a number of small factual errors. For example, Margaret Thatcher's leadership is described as lasting from 1975 to 1992, although on the same page she is correctly described as leaving office in 1990 (180). Thatcher's omnipresent media image is described as a “constant reminder that the head of state was a woman” (181). This is a mistake I first pointed out in 1982; U.S.-born scholars like Lovenduski sometimes find it difficult to distinguish between the roles of head of government and head of state. Facts about far-away places are also sometimes shaky as in the claim that there are “committees of women legislators” in New Zealand and Australia (25). It is also odd to refer to an absence of “formal compulsory quotas” in Sweden (37), given the quotas introduced into the rules of left parties, including the “zipper” requirement for Social Democratic Party lists to alternate male and female names.
Nonetheless, the collection works well in illustrating the concerns over time of a feminist political scientist engaging strenuously with the nature of her discipline along with the changing nature of feminist scholarship and movement agendas. It provides important insights into how “politics and gender” became established as a subfield of political science and how and why different conceptual approaches were adopted over time. By the end, it is hard see how political science can do without feminism—if it is to provide answers to key democratic questions such as accountability, responsiveness, and inclusiveness.
