In their essay “Defending Modernity” (Politics & Gender 1 (March), 2005), Julia Adams and Ann Shola Orloff took gender and politics scholars to task for the ways in which they (we) engage gender and “high politics.” They call for a “more serious analytical engagement between gendered and mainstream students of politics,” with particular attention to “the relationship between gendered representations of war and actual military campaigns” (p. 179). Ultimately, they argue, scholars must consider that logics of masculine protection and domination “arise out of properly political sources that need to be better understood and incorporated into gender studies” (p. 179).

Iris Marion Young's “The Logic of Masculinist Protection” (Signs 29 [Autumn], 2003) and Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris's work (Rising Tide, 2003; Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide, 2004) were identified as examples of the ways in which gender and “high politics” scholarship has missed the mark when it comes to issues of modernity, politics, and power relationships at the macrolevel. Young, and Inglehart and Norris frankly disagree, and they present their refutations of Adams and Orloff's claims in the following rejoinders. We have let Adams and Orloff have the last—though hardly final—word.

Modernization and Gender Equality: A Response to Adams and Orloff

Modernity, Emancipatory Values, and Power: A Rejoinder to Adams and Orloff

Once More into the Breach with Modernity: Rejoinder to Inglehart and Norris, and Young