Intersectionality is credited with energizing scholarship across disciplines and developing a new paradigm for critically analyzing the relationships of race, gender, class, and sexuality, among other salient political-identity categories. Some political scientists initially found it challenging to integrate intersectional analyses into their work and resisted the call to analyze these categories of identity more substantively than as merely a litany of control variables in predictive models. However, those political scientists with particular interests in the study of women of color in politics countered this disciplinary resistance, and their persistent counterarguments in numerous journal articles, special issues, critical dialogues, and book chapters together amplified the contribution of intersectional models and made the case for the utility of intersectionality for the study of politics. In no small part, those scholars also made the case for centering women of color as political actors, despite their relatively small numbers in politics. These scholarly trajectories have given way to this study of African American women state legislators. Nadia Brown draws upon the cumulative work of these scholars to examine how identity informs and creates nuances in policymakers’ perspectives on how best to represent their constituents.

Drawing on two of the pillars of intersectionality—the complexity and salience of identity—Brown centrally argues that state legislators understand themselves not only as belonging to multiple identity groups, but that sometimes the interests of their identity groups are in conflict. Understanding how state legislators reconcile these conflicts and allow their identities to inform their policy decision making are the core components of Sisters in the Statehouse. As well, in the tradition of intersectional scholarship’s focus on traditionally marginalized groups, the author centers African American women as the subject of her study. She uses the Maryland legislature as a case study, a state with a larger concentration of black women representatives than most other states. This provides her the opportunity to examine how black women differ in their policymaking from other groups of legislators, and this state offers enough variance among black women legislators that she is able to parcel out variations according to other identity markers, such as age and life experiences. Some will regard Brown’s choice of a singular state as a methodological limitation, but this is a sage choice given her need to examine a critical mass of black women legislators and the nuances in representation she identities.

Brown focuses on the complexity of identity and the differences within groups to examine the nuances in identity that she argues are critical for understanding policy differences that emerge among groups we commonly understand as monolithic. In the first chapter, she introduces the concept of representational identity theory to capture such intragroup variations in representation and argues that it helps to explain convergences in policy decisions by black women lawmakers as well as those points of divergence. It is those points of divergence that mark the interesting contribution Brown's work. It is here that she illustrates the complexities of black women’s calculations regarding how they rationalize their legislative decisions.

The author begins by examining the intersections of race and gender in policymaking, but holding true to her interests in the complexity of identity, she goes beyond analyzing these two categories as the primary identity markers informing state legislators’ decision making. She productively complicates her analyses further by looking to legislators’ age, marital, parental, and caregiver status, arguing for the centrality of these characteristics collectively informing their decision making. In keeping with intersectionality theory as well, Brown argues that each of these identity markers must be read in relation to the other. For example, she positions caregiving as informed by both race and gender, producing a unique experience for the caregiver which differently informs how black women view caregiving as a policy issue. She sufficiently complicates our treatments of identity in political institutions throughout the study. However, her findings related to age or generational cohorts as a significant marker of black women state legislators’ identities is a nuance not commonly examined, producing new ways of thinking through our common understandings of group representation and policy decisions.

In Chapter 2, Brown reports data from a series of feminist life histories she conducted with black women legislators. She uses this methodology, popular among historians, to explore lawmakers’ early life experiences with race, gender, and religion; to understand their current political attitudes and behaviors; and to argue for the cumulative effects of life experiences. Brown uses the legislators’ own narratives of identity to examine their policy positions and argues how their identity constructions uniquely inform their decision making. Across the next three chapters (3–5) she uses data from in-depth interviews with state legislators and participant observations to examine representational identity theory at work in case studies of domestic violence, marriage equality, and elder caregiving.

That identity informs decision making is not new for scholars of representation. However, Brown’s insistence that variations emerge among black women and evidences systematic patterns of difference marks a point of divergence from many scholars of representation who are more likely to focus on commonalities among group members. She offers caution to those who understand black lawmakers or women lawmakers as having essentially the same representational impetuses. She claims that based on their identity and cumulative life experiences, black women execute a representation style that differs from both their male and white female counterparts, and she further asserts that varied generational cohorts of black women will come to still different representational approaches.

Brown’s interests in the complexity of identity results in a focus on smaller and smaller groups with each additional identity marker she analyzes. As such, her approach exacerbates an underlying tension between intersectionality and representational theories. A thorny and unresolved issue in her analysis is the parceling out of the conditions in which lawmakers see themselves and their decisions as part of a group versus informed by individual ideations. This tension between analyzing legislators as a group of representational voices versus analyzing an array of singular lawmakers is very present in this study. This tension mirrors a quandary often present within representation scholarship that vacillates between desires to see lawmakers who legislate on the basis of their individual experiences—which in some cases generates the diversity of ideas we often laud—or worrying whether legislating on the basis of one’s individual experiences can be harmful to the very constituents whom legislators purport to represent. Brown’s study is centered in this contentious debate, yet she sidesteps offering a resolution to this conflict.

Despite this issue, Brown’s analysis offers an important intervention into the representational scholarship. Perhaps most importantly, the author makes a critical contribution to political science by uplifting black women as political actors, an area that is severely neglected in political science even though black women have proven central to black politics, gender politics, are the driving force constituting the “new American electorate” that emerged in 2008. Those preparing future scholars to take on the twenty-first century questions of representation should add Sisters in the Statehouse and other books in this genre to their core reading lists. Brown offers an example of the very type of intersectional analysis that scholars ruled impossible by citing the difficulties of drilling down beyond master categories such as race and gender, the unwieldly nature of increasing the number of variables, and the explanatory power of models containing so many variables that they cannot make credible claims. What Brown accomplishes in this study is a convincing example of the usefulness of intersectional analyses and demonstrates the “difference that difference makes” beyond comparisons among blacks, whites, and Latinos, for example. Overall, she encourages scholars to start with disrupting monolithic group presentations in order to arrive at more robust analyses of identity and representation.