In conducting interviews with female African American state legislators, I found that the great debates among women and politics scholars over the meaning of women's issues have not captured a major issue that surfaced time and again in the interviews. The African American women I interviewed affirmed that “women's issues” constituted a top priority on their legislative agendas and understood themselves as representatives of women's interests. But when they began to discuss the issues they championed on behalf of women, these issues were not the “usual suspects.” They often mentioned proposed legislation that I would have coded as a “children's issue” or, at times, a “race issue.” These legislators articulated a political agenda reflecting crosscutting issues that were not easily codified along a single issue axis. Instead, the legislators articulated their legislative priorities as complex and multifaceted. They saw their legislative priorities affecting constituents across their districts, but they also keenly expressed the impact of these issues on the lives and well-being of women in particular.

An interview with an African American woman representing an urban district in the state of Maryland illustrates this point. She referred to her work on criminal justice as representing “women's interests.” Befuddled by her statement, I pushed her, assuming she misspoke. Instead, she explained that the high incarceration rates among black men in her district contributed exponentially to the number of single, female-headed households, many of which faced economic challenges without the financial support of a partner or, in many cases, a coparent. This, the legislator argued, exerted an impact on the long-term financial stability and economic viability of women and families in her district. She also cited the financial toll exacted on women who are disproportionately responsible for the support and care of an incarcerated family member, as well as the distressing effects of incarceration on women's psychological and emotional well-being. For all of these reasons, she determined criminal justice to be concretely in the interest of women in particular.

This Maryland legislator's articulation of her legislative priorities highlights one of the central problems associated with the concept of “women interests”—which women's interests? Women and politics scholarship offers little in terms of addressing the limitations and effects of simplifying multifaceted issues. For example, the effects of framing interests as women's interests does not capture the complexities of the ways that issues actually present in politics. Such framing also obscures how issues affect women differently, particularly as it relates to the material consequences of race, class, and sexual identities.

Those interviews suggested that the concept of women's issues as commonly deployed is too narrowly defined. In this essay, I discuss the challenges that this narrow definition presents to women's representation in politics, and to our research efforts as women and politics scholars. To address these challenges, we must develop frameworks for understanding women's interests as complex, fluid, and varied, while maintaining the political possibilities of group mobilization. Such a framework must account for the coexistence of shared as well as divergent interests under the label of women's interests. Here, I suggest that the growing interdisciplinary scholarship on intersectionality helps us to move away from frameworks that homogenize women's interests and toward an embrace of women's common, as well as divergent, interests.

Beyond neglecting crosscutting issues, narrow conceptualizations of women's interests also compromise the effective representation of women by those elected officials, interest groups, community leaders, and movements that lay claim to representing women. Numerous studies point to the ill effects of framing interests along a singular axis as an issue of gender, race, or sexuality. These studies illustrate how singular axis framing can result in a failure to represent subpopulations of women who are often the least empowered and most vulnerable segments of already politically marginalized groups (Cohen Reference Cohen1999; Hancock Reference Hancock2004; Mink Reference Mink1998). Further, single axis models limit the extent to which representatives are held accountable for “showing up” on behalf of all women. Some representatives are viewed as obligated to represent crosscutting issues, while others are excused altogether from such representation responsibilities (Cohen Reference Cohen1999; Hawkesworth Reference Hawkesworth2003, Strolovich Reference Strolovich2007). The responsibility for addressing crosscutting issues often become largely the purview of those who descriptively represent multiply marginalized groups.

This single axis model has limited women and politics researchers' approaches for defining and studying women's interests. A popular approach for studying women's interests is to rely on women's interests groups to inform and define group interests.Footnote ¹ These groups, however, operate in a competitive environment, are often challenged to simplify their group's interests, and present their group as most deserving of policy attention. To attract funders and members, and gain notoriety, groups are often under great pressure to present themselves as clearly operating in one issue domain—race, gender, disability, or sexuality (Goldberg Reference Goldberg, Grabham, Cooper, Krishnadas and Herman2008; Valentine Reference Valentine2007). The reliance of researchers on these groups' articulation of women's interests contributes to the homogenizing of women's interests and, notably, contributes to the amplification of the most privileged women's voices, while further subordinating the interests of diverse groups of women.

Finally, the narrow conceptualization of women's interests has significant implications for research on representation. Studies on the substantive representation of women assess the extent to which representatives are “standing for” or “acting for” women without thoroughly engaging the critical question, “Which women?” In missing this question, we fail to uncover the nuances of women's interests, and we miss opportunities to explore the implications of representing some interests to the neglect of others. The costs exacted upon those representatives who do choose to represent the most marginalized among women remains an understudied topic in women and politics.

Women and politics scholars have grown ever more adept at acknowledging the differences that exist among women; however, we have lagged in designing and executing research that takes seriously the effects of difference. So while we acknowledge the material consequences that emanate from differences among women according to their race, class, sexuality, geography, and other categories of difference, we have not devised research frameworks that appreciate how such differences complicate group interests and the representation of such interests. Fortunately, new conceptual possibilities are opening as women and politics scholars substantively engage with the evolving intersectionality discourse.Footnote ²

The problems associated with defining women's interests and what it means to substantively represent women strike at the center of women and politics scholars' ongoing discussions of intersectionality. These problems remind us not only of the value of intersectionality as a theoretical concept but also of the imperative to develop research designs that are more adept at handling complexity. Intersectionality theorists reject treating women as a homogeneous group, as well as the idea that gender can be parceled out as a single category without attention to other politically salient categories, such as race, class, and sexuality. Instead, intersectionality pushes us to think about the differences among women, and offers a means for embracing the complexities produced.

As intersectionality has developed as an interdisciplinary framework, scholars are increasingly more attentive to the social constructions of identities across time, geographic space, and cultural contexts (Smooth, Reference Smooth and O'Conner2010). These theoretical developments enable scholars to grapple with the extent to which power relationships between socially constructed categories are fluid and unstable. Such attention to fluidity constructively complicates notions of who is privileged and who is oppressed by recognizing the moments in which groups and/or individuals are at times privileged and, under different contexts, oppressed.

Bringing this emphasis on fluidity to our thinking about women's interests allows for divergences according to context, which includes across time, culture, and geographic space. It creates possibilities for shifts in what constitutes women's interests by allowing greater divergence, and opens rather than closes women's interests. Since intersectionality treats inequalities as multiply determined and deriving from multiple systems and structures of oppression, rather than emanating from a singular system such as patriarchy, it can guide our thinking on crosscutting issues.

Social scientists often shy away from intersectional approaches, fearing that they lack the methodological tools to capture adequately the complexity and fluidity among categories specified by the theory. As women in politics scholars, we have at our disposal several methodological tools that can facilitate the application of intersectionality to the study of women's interests and women's representation. For example, time series analysis can account for changes in the status of variables over designated periods, which can help capture the fluctuations in the power relationships among race, gender, class, sexuality, and other socially constructed categories over time. Those studying women's interests in the context of American political institutions can employ spatial analysis to explore geographic variations in women's interests and draw on district-level and census-tract data to study the representation of those interests.Footnote ³ With such an approach, we can account for changes in women's interests across time and context, and address variation among women. Finally, such an approach better positions scholars to articulate the full range of women's interests and what is required of representatives to represent the complexities of the women's lives.

As scholars embrace the principles of intersectionality and apply its tenets to research designs, we are better positioned to grapple with the complexities of women's interests and the representation of those interests. Any progressive vision of women's interests must reject notions of those interests existing along a singular axis, or notions that limit women's interests to a set of issues that portray a sense of sameness among them. Fundamentally, women's interests must be envisioned as complex, varied, in flux, and divergent if we are to articulate a sense of their alignment with the ways women experience the world.