Historical perspectives form the backdrop and the context for much work on gender in comparative politics scholarship, yet history itself has rarely been incorporated as the lens through which the theorizing of gender occurs. The current growth of interest in gender studies in American political development is strangely not reflected in contemporary trends of historical institutionalism within comparative politics (see Gretchen Ritter's essay in this issue). Although scholars of comparative politics working on gender or women almost always incorporate historical perspectives in their analyses, history is generally drawn on as background or to provide context. History itself is generally not the primary focus of their analysis and historical processes are not used to generate theory. It has been only recently that scholars, especially in the field of historical institutionalism (HI), have begun to think about new ways in which history could be used to develop theory and create new empirical knowledge in the field of comparative politics and gender.

In the 1960s and 1970s, macroanalytic historical institutionalism was ascendant as social scientists focused on state and nation building, revolution and peasant rebellion, democratization and regime change. Gender rarely, if ever, featured in this literature. After the 1980s and especially after the 1990s, scholars working within the framework of HI “shortened their time horizons, contracted their regime questions, and narrowed the range of considered outcomes” (Katznelson Reference Katznelson, Lichbach and Zuckerman1997, 85). Much of this literature was more focused than was the earlier literature on interclass coalitions (Moore Reference Moore1966), the state (Skocpol Reference Skocpol1979), or state building (C. Tilly Reference Tilly1975). Contemporary HI is concerned with the policy implications of various institutional arrangements, how and why institutions change, how ideas shape policymaking and institutional structures, and the unintended effects of institutional structures on policy (see, for example, Beissinger Reference Beissinger2002; Collier and Collier Reference Collier and Collier1991; Pierson Reference Pierson2000; Steinmo, Thelen, and Longstreth Reference Steinmo, Thelen and Longstreth1992). It evolved alongside, but separate from, sociological institutionalism and rational choice institutionalism (Tarrow Reference Tarrow2007, 4).

In spite of the popularity of historical institutionalism, there has been very little effort to incorporate gender concerns into the mainstream of this body of historical scholarship. There are a few exceptions. Susan Gal and Gail Kligman's book on The Politics of Gender after Socialism (Reference Gal and Kligman2000) investigates how states and economic change are gendered and how states and markets affected gender relations in the context of the transition from socialism to capitalism in East Central Europe. Another example, “The Changing Logic of Political Citizenship” (Ramirez et al. Reference Ramirez1997), shows how the acquisition of women's suffrage rights between 1890 and 1990, often described as a series of national struggles to extend political rights to women, was in fact a thoroughly global phenomenon that spread through international networks, links, and influences.

There are hints that we will see more HI approaches to comparative gender and politics research, given some of the new work on the horizon by scholars like Mona Lena Krook, Georgina Waylen, Lenita Freidenvall Fiona MacKay, and others. In her work on gender quotas, Krook looks at sequences of reiterated problem solving within the context of historical trajectories in analyzing how legal setbacks in countries like France and the United Kingdom and the delegitimization of quotas affected subsequent quota campaigns. She shows how earlier events influenced both the form and content of later strategies, though in different ways, in the two countries (Krook Reference Krook2005b, 3).

In general, however, those focusing on gender and politics in a comparative context have not attempted to engage HI per se, while mainstream HI has not incorporated gender issues. There certainly have been important efforts by gender scholars to engage institutionalism, but not its HI variant. This is evident in the work on state feminism (Lovenduski Reference Lovenduski2005; Mazur Reference Mazur2002; Mc Bride Stetson and Mazur Reference McBride Stetson and Mazur1995), the welfare state (Orloff Reference Orloff1996; Sainsbury Reference Sainsbury1999), the way in which development institutions promote gender (Goetz Reference Goetz1997), quotas and the representation of women (Dahlerup Reference Dahlerup2006), and work on regime change (Franceschet Reference Franceschet2005; Htun Reference Htun2003; Waylen Reference Waylen1994). And although much of this work accounts for the historical development of institutions and their impact, the historical dimension itself is not generally theorized.

In the field of women's history itself, the emphasis has been on descriptive and interpretive accounts of women's experiences and lives — despite Louise Tilly's 1989 call for more analytical and problem-solving work, which she identified as an “increasingly urgent task.” She envisioned drawing on women's lives to speak to broader historical concerns, be they structural or ideational changes (L. Tilly Reference Tilly1989, 447). Most historians who write about women's lives have, in fact, moved away from a social science approach and toward a cultural studies approach, believing that the nature of their evidence is more conducive to understanding significance than devising analytical models.Footnote ¹

We have only begun to draw on historical experiences of women and gender relations to inform current debates in comparative politics and to develop more complete and robust theories. Greater attention to history would help us explain better how and why events occur, under what socioeconomic conditions and political constraints, and in what sequence. Historians and political scientists have different methods and objectives. Historians tend to account for change in it is specificity—in the how and why events occurred—yet situated within a broader understanding of social structures and processes. Political scientists, on the other hand, are interested in patterns, meanings, concepts, and generalizability. Yet we know that our theories remain incomplete without the perspective of time. As Ira Katznelson reminds us (1997, 95), “History is more than context, raw material, or a site for the play of the microdynamics of power.”

Uses of History in Comparative Gender and Politics Studies

History is integral to comparative politics, and almost all the best work in gender and comparative political studies today is situated in a historical context. But history itself is only infrequently used to develop gender and comparative politics theory. It is rarely used, for example, to examine the diachronic sequence of events, the influence of critical conjunctures of events or triggering events, causality as it relates to synchronicities, critical choices by actors, or trajectories of path dependence. There are, however, exceptions.

Mounira M. Charrad, in States and Women's Rights: The Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (Reference Charrad2001), examines the relationship between state formation and women's rights using a comparative historical method. Charrad's work looks at three countries that share a common geographic location in the North African Magrib and a common Maliki legal tradition within Sunni Islam. All three countries are based on patrilineal kinship systems where politics has involved tensions between central authority and tribal groupings. Despite these similarities, the three countries developed along different long-term historical trajectories in relation to family law as a result of their divergent colonial experiences and the ways in which the state related to tribal-based kinship groups. Thus, in Tunisia, where the state sought to destroy the power of the kin groupings and could do so as a result of the extensive integration of rural and urban areas prior to and during colonialism, the state implemented the most progressive family codes. The reforms were seen as a way of unifying the country. The Moroccan state had a history of conflict between the centralized state and autonomous kin-based groups. The French colonial strategy of indirect rule and divide and rule meant that at independence, tribal kin groupings were fairly autonomous. Thus, the state deemed it necessary to play the groups off against one another in order to prevent the rise of any one dominant force (pp. 234–35). At independence, the state relied extensively on alliances with tribal power to preserve the monarchy's authority. Subsequently, its family code reinforced existing kin ties to the detriment of women's rights. Finally, Algeria's colonialization had left some tribes destroyed while others were intact. Not only were the bases of authority divided, but the state was also ideologically divided. This ideological fragmentation meant that the personal status code was not passed until many years after independence in 1984. This type of theorizing of the gender implications of state and nation building using analysis of historical trajectories is uncommon.

More often, history is used to set the stage for theoretical development. Sometimes, history is treated as the backdrop to the events that form the bulk of the text in country studies. Typical of the authors of many country studies, Jaqui True begins her book Gender, Globalization and Postsocialism (Reference True2003) with an overview of gender relations under Czechoslovak socialism. The overview serves as an historical prelude of conditions and events leading up to the time period of her book, which examines how gender relations, identities, and differences were transformed by globalization after the 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia.

Sometimes, a particular topic relating to women's movements, women and citizenship, and democratization is analyzed over time. Lisa Baldez, in Why Women Protest (Reference Baldez2002), shows how women's movements emerged as responses to partisan realignment in which the political opposition forces took up a new set of issues. Women responded to these changes by focusing on women's exclusion from political decision making. Baldez examines these dynamics by comparing two periods of protest in Chile: the leftist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73) and the authoritarian dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973–90).

Shireen Hassim, in Women's Organizations and Democracy in South Africa: Contesting Authority (Reference Hassim2006), analyzes the relationship between the evolution of a democratic state in South Africa and the role of the South African women's movement and women's political activism across a period that spans a quarter of a century. Hassim asks: To what extent were women's movements able to build autonomous organizations while forging alliances with other progressive forces and how did this change with the end of apartheid? By tracing key historical events, she shows how women's organizations engaged with the nation's liberation movement did not choose one or another definition of their role but, rather, upheld both race and class oppression in shaping gender oppression, while demonstrating the distinctiveness of gender oppression from race and class. At the same time, she shows how the gender discourse was at times constrained by the broader political discourses and contexts (2006, 246).

Birte Siim, in Gender and Citizenship (Reference Siim2000), draws on an even longer timeline, starting with the French Revolution, to contrast both the ideology and practice of citizenship as it affected women's status in three European countries. She critically examines the evolution of republican citizenship in France, liberal citizenship in Britain, and social citizenship in Denmark. She traces the origins of these three distinctive models of citizenship to explore the limitations of France's pro-natalist policies deriving from notions of republican citizenship, the dilemmas posed by Britain's male breadwinner model for social policy, and some of the limitations of the Danish social citizenship model, with respect to globalization and migration and restructuring of the welfare state.

In all these cases, historical analysis is integral to the theoretical contributions, but only insofar as it provides contrast and context. Many other historical works are more descriptive. Susan Blackburn adopts a time line from the early 1990s to the present in examining in rare depth the relationship between the state, the women's movement, and women's status in Indonesia in Women and the State in Indonesia (Reference Blackburn2004).

One finds the least attention to history in quantitative cross-national studies that are attempting to extract generalizable findings. When longitudinal perspectives are incorporated, their purpose is often to increase the number of observations in order to strengthen a more general argument, rather than to trace change over time. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris's Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World comes closest to incorporating historical perspectives of this kind. Situated in the context of the rise of greater numbers of postindustrial societies in the course of the twentieth century, the book understandably has the primary goal not of documenting the historical trajectory of the impact of these trends on gender equality but of showing that the shift from agrarian to industrialized societies, and from industrial to postindustrial societies, has an impact on attitudes toward gender equality globally. Nevertheless, historical change becomes an important part of the story they are telling.

A widely recognized problem in gender-related cross-national quantitative work in general is a lack of data, but it is even a bigger problem for longitudinal analysis. Although efforts are being made to improve data collection, basic gender-related measures are virtually unusable on a cross-national basis because of the large number of missing cases. The Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM) that is a composite of three basic dimensions of empowerment for women (economic participation and decision making, political participation and decision making, and control over economic resources) is missing values for 102 out of 177 countries, that is, 57% of them. Adult female literacy rates as a ratio of male rates is missing data for 22 out of the poorest 50 countries in the world, or almost half. Data is missing for 69 out of the poorest 100 countries regarding female employment in agriculture.Footnote ² As a consequence, if one intends to do good gender-related comparative work cross-nationally on anything other than suffrage, female political representation, and a few other topics, one is seriously handicapped by the data limitations, and generalizability remains confined to only the wealthier countries. The problem of doing longitudinal studies along these lines is magnified to an even greater extent.

Cross-national surveys throughout the world have only recently been carried out. Even the oldest major world surveys are fairly recent: Eurobarometer started in 1973 and World Values Survey in 1981. Most surveys outside Europe are barely a decade old: Latino barometer was launched in 1995; Afrobarometer in 1999, and Asian barometer in 2001. Many of these surveys are fairly limited in their coverage. Afrobarometer surveys only 15 out of 47 sub-Saharan African countries, while Asian barometer covers 8 countries. Recently, some new international surveys have been initiated, with Gallop International and Pew Global Attitudes starting in 2002. The newness of these surveys clearly limits longitudinal analyses.

Rationales for Incorporating History into Comparative Studies of Gender

If adopting an historical approach is so onerous from a data point of view, why attempt to incorporate history into comparative studies of gender? Not only is history an excellent basis upon which to build theory, as the HI scholars have shown, but history can also serve as a corrective against facile assumptions that come from static snapshots of momentary phenomena or cross-sectional analyses. There has been much discussion in recent years about the tensions between women's rights and cultural rights. Most studies in this vein have focused on contemporary contexts and conflicts. By adopting an historical approach, we might see how sweeping generalizations often depict culture, especially non-Western cultures, as though they are static. Cultural practices, such as female genital cutting, honor killings, virginity testing, sati, and veiling, are often treated as though they have always existed, and are immutable and permanent features of cultures. Yet historical analysis shows that cultural practices have always been negotiated, debated, and modified and have varying meaning and salience over time. We often do not see them as historically situated and evolving. In fact, sometimes some of the most problematic customs from the point of view of women's rights evolved or became more widely practiced in recent years.

Cultures have always been, and continue to be, changing and malleable. Cultural practices are mostly good, but the ones that harm women emerge and become solidified as a result of economic, political, and other factors. At the same time, they can also be undone by similar changes. They can come to symbolize national, cultural, ethnic, or religious difference, and can be defended as though the heart of a culture were dependent on the violation of certain rights of women. If there is a lot invested in such practices in terms of political or economic power, they may become more entrenched and less amenable to change. However, when incentive structures change, cultural identities, practices, patterns, and meanings can be quite fluid, flexible, and open to transformation or reinvention. Moreover, cultural practices and beliefs have always been politically contested. Today, women's rights movements worldwide are challenging many of the practices that constrain women. Historical perspectives therefore provide important correctives to the view of culture as entrenched.

Historical perspectives can also provide new understandings of a phenomenon, even on questions that have been extensively explored, like the much-studied issue of women's representation. Some scholars extrapolate from only one part of the world and draw general observations without looking at differential historical impacts.

For example, studies of Western countries have suggested that the longer the period of time since suffrage and the year women were able to run for office, the higher the rates of female representation. Yet in cross-national perspective, there is no significant relationship between the length of time women have been able to run for office and levels of women's representation, except in established democracies. In fact, there are at least three groups of countries that have different dynamics when it comes to women's suffrage, the right to run for office, and rates of female representation. One group, based in Europe and North and South America, granted women the right to participate politically prior to World War II. In these countries, the earlier that women gained political rights, the higher the rates of female representation later on. The second group includes the large numbers of countries that gained independence after World War II and simultaneously granted both men and women suffrage and the right to run for office. These two groups contrast with the third: the most recently independent states. Many of these most recently independent countries introduced quotas to increase rates of female representation, making the years since the introduction of women's suffrage irrelevant to higher rates of women's representation (Caraway Reference Caraway2004; Tripp and Kang forthcoming).

Sometimes the preoccupation with a new trend blinds us to historical contexts. For example, because so many countries around the world introduced gender quotas after the mid-1990s to increase female representation in legislatures, much of the focus has been on the new countries that have adopted quotas. Yet it makes no sense to talk about the impact of the introduction of quotas without acknowledging the fact that for decades, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had high rates of female representation due to the use of gender quotas. This persisted until the late 1980s, when there was a drop in women's legislative representation. In Eastern Europe, the average rates of female legislative representation plummeted from 31% to 9%, while in the former Soviet republics, the drop was even sharper, from an average of 50% in 1985 to 11% in 2000 (Tripp and Kang forthcoming). The history of quotas in this part of the world has virtually gone without mention in the newer discussions of gender quotas, yet it is most relevant to theorizing about these contemporary trends (one exception is Krook Reference Krook2005a). These earlier uses of gender quotas were not restricted to Eastern bloc socialist countries. In fact, Ghana's Convention People's Party had a gender quota in 1959; Tanzania had reserved seats in the mid-1970s; Senegal's Parti Socialiste reserved one-quarter of its seats in 1982; and Egypt had quotas from 1979 to 1986. The contemporary trends clearly need to be studied in light of earlier efforts to address problems of female representation.

New Directions

Despite existing challenges in doing historical and longitudinal research in comparative politics, there are compelling reasons to initiate research agendas that incorporate historical perspectives in new and creative ways. We need to be asking: What are the broad continuities and disjunctures between the past and the present? How did particular events or critical junctures affect later political developments? Would one identify critical junctures differently by adopting a gender perspective? How might one use layering (incorporating new elements to a stable institutional framework), conversion (incorporating new goals or actors to produce institutional change) and policy drift (slow transformation of institutional arrangement as a result of socioeconomic change) to explain changes in gender policy? Why does one of these forms of institutional change occur rather than another and what explains the direction of incremental changes (Thelen Reference Thelen, Mahoney and Rueschemeyer2003; Béland Reference Béland2007)? How are institutional changes related to broader socioeconomic and political changes? What difference did different actors make? What patterns can be identified in such continuities and disjunctures, and what similarities and differences emerge? What is the significance of the sequence of events and the synchronicity of events? What outcomes followed from the pursuit of particular trajectories?

Historical analysis could be brought to bear in studies of policies affecting women. Already, comparative policy studies have progressed in Europe, thanks to projects like that of the Research Network on Gender Politics and the State that has looked at why some states are more open to women's demands than others since 1970s.Footnote ³ Other Europe-based studies include the “Quality in Gender + Equality Policies (QUING)Footnote ⁴ and the European Commission MAGEEQ project on gender mainstreaming.Footnote ⁵Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (2003) examined women's movements in advanced industrialized countries in Europe and North America, using explicitly comparative and longitudinal methods. This volume, edited by Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith, and Dieter Rucht, shows how women in the 1970s and 1980s were active in responding to changes in state policy at a time when the state itself was privatizing, restructuring, and reallocating power in ways that shifted the responsibility of providing welfare services to lower levels of governments, nonelected state agencies, and courts, to international bodies like the European Union, and to private citizen groups. At the same time, women's movements themselves sought to change policies, institutions, and discourses on women's rights. Little work of this kind, however, has been done cross-nationally outside of Europe and even less historically.

We need more analysis of questions like, for example: Under what conditions are woman-friendly policies adopted? Why do states adopt woman-friendly policies, especially in nondemocratic countries? What are the sequences of events and circumstances that lead to the adoption of such policies? How have policies been framed differently over time? How have norms traveled from country to country over time? What has given rise to changing norms over time? Why are some policies easier to adopt than others in different time periods? What is the impact of the rise of regional organizations like the European Union on the adoption of women-friendly policies? Do critical junctures in the aftermath of conflicts and civil war provide propitious moments for radical changes in gender relations and women-related policies and leadership?

There is new interest in constitutionalism and how it affects women. How have constitutions and legislative changes shaped gender relations over time within countries and comparatively between countries? How do we understand the historic emergence of conservative and progressive women's movements? Why has the introduction of democracy created new opportunities for women in some historic periods and countries but not in others? These are but a few of the types of questions that are emerging and need to be theorized both in comparative and historical perspective.