Why has the pace of electing women to the U.S. Congress been so slow? This is the central question addressed by Barbara Palmer and Dennis Simon. Their volume is a welcome addition to the gender and politics scholarly literature and is the first book since Barbara Burrell's 1994 A Woman's Place Is in the House to provide a broad overview of the role of gender in congressional elections.

In her book, Lisa H. Schwartzman engages several liberal theorists as well as some “postmodernists” from a feminist perspective. She makes use of a number of feminist thinkers to assist her in developing her arguments and clarifying her theoretical alliances. The author agrees with some liberal feminists that liberalism may be able to accommodate many feminist claims. However, she argues that even a reformed liberalism cannot meet the higher standard of being able to root “out problems that stem from systems of oppression” (p. 161). Schwartzman does not find that postmoderism, as she understands it, can meet this test adequately either. She claims, therefore, to offer an alternative method for a liberally informed feminist theory that seeks to end the structural domination of women based in the concrete experiences of women themselves. The book is tightly written and coherently argued. Each chapter is well organized and the prose is clear.

For a series on comparative politics, Jane Bayes and her coauthors have written a text that is long overdue: the comparative history and politics of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, with women at the center, in the global neoliberal era. The book offers a deep critique both of economic neoliberalism (not the peculiar U.S. use of the term liberalism) and of traditional conceptions of democracy, which, they argue, should become “thicker” in women-inclusive, gender-mainstreamed ways. While the book focuses on secondary research rather than new, original research, it repackages the traditional ways that feminist researchers, especially Americanists, view the three nations of North America.

Over the past 15 years, gender quota debates have emerged in national politics all over the world. More than 40 countries have reformed their constitutions or passed new electoral laws requiring that women comprise certain percentages of aspirants, candidates, or legislative seats, while in many other countries, political parties have adopted quotas on their own. This phenomenon raises both normative and empirical questions, ranging from whether gender quotas are appropriate to why countries adopt them and how effective they have been. Drude Dahlerup's edited book addresses these concerns with the first worldwide compilation of gender quota studies. The editor brings together a diverse group of authors who examine quotas in seven regions of the world, and she brackets their contributions with theoretical chapters on quota adoption and implementation. The result is the most comprehensive resource on gender quotas to date.