Abortion Politics in North America. By Melissa Haussman. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. 2005. 209 pp. $49.95.

Abortion politics is a bellwether of women's rights in any country. Melissa Haussman analyzes abortion politics in Canada, Mexico, and the United States using social movement and political mobilization theories to access these three North American states. She finds that rhetoric and reality for girls and women is very different in all three states. In Canada, the national health service covers abortion procedures. However, it is more complicated than that because of funding and access issues. In addition, Canada requires that only medical physicians have the ability to provide abortions, therefore excluding nurse practitioners and other qualified health care workers from providing these services. Mexico has officially criminalized and forbidden all abortions (except for rape survivors, who must petition their local state's attorney general for permission to abort). However, a thriving illegal abortion business exists in Mexico with semiacknowledgment from the state. The official ban on legal abortion is maintained despite the fact that illegal abortions are the third-largest cause of pregnant women's deaths in Mexico. In the United States, abortion is legal but highly restricted. Poor women have limited access to funds for legal abortions in a few states, while many states provide no public funding for abortions. Haussman summarizes these realities on the ground as “a gap formed between legal declarations of rights and the extent of health services provisions” (p. 1).

Gender and Civil Society: Transcending Boundaries. Edited by Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan. London and New York: Routledge. 2005. 257 pp. $125.00.

This book provides a welcome addition to the ever-growing comparative scholarship on gender politics and the state. Editors Jude Howell and Diane Mulligan bring together a group of experts with the ideal blend of country expertise and understanding about comparative analysis and theoretical issues to systematically map out and operationalize the concept of “civil society” in a cross-national study of the interface between women's organizations and the state. Howell raises the central analytical problem of the book in the introduction. While the concept of civil society has great promise for understanding how, why, and to what extent women organize and seek to influence the state, comparative gender and politics analysts have shied away from using the term; comparativists and political theorists have basically ignored the quite obviously gendered aspects of civil society. As this edited volume convincingly asserts, intersecting the study of civil society with comparative gender research moves the two areas much further along by compelling “researchers to gauge their understanding of empirical civil societies, to question the assumptions about the relationship between democratization, civil society and gender equality and to query the idea of civil society and feminism as universally valid concepts” (p. 246).

Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization. By Drucilla K. Barker and Susan F. Feiner. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2004. 193 pp. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.

Work for women outside of the home was once thought to be the basis of women's equality and liberation. And it still may be. But the quality of that work is certainly of great importance, too. How have women fared with respect to the quality of the work that they have done in the past century? What consequences, if any, follow from globalization for the lives of female workers around the world? Is a distinctly feminist model of economics necessary for understanding women's lives or will classical economic models suffice? Drucilla Barker and Susan Feiner pursue all three of these questions very seriously and with considerable success in Liberating Economics.

Sex and Consequences: Abortion, Public Policy and the Economics of Fertility. By Phillip B Levine. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2004. 240 pp. $35.00.

From the title alone it appears that either the author and his editor know little about sex and gender research or they think that any book with “sex” in the title will sell, or both. Thus, it is fortunate that the subtitle does accurately describe the contents of the book: an economic analysis of the consequences of changes in abortion law and policy on fertility behavior.

Black Sexual Politics: African-Americans, Gender and the New Racism. By Patricia Hill Collins. New York: Routledge. 2004. 374 pp. $26.00.

To a large extent, scholarship on black politics often focuses primarily on institutions, rule of law, processes, political actors, and citizens but with very little attention to issues of gender and sexuality. In contrast, the principal aim of this book is to explore what the author sees as the inextricable links between racism and gender. The basic thesis of this well-written, important, and provocative book is that the fight against racism, especially the “new racism,” can never be won without first challenging sexism, which simultaneously oppresses African-American men and women.

Opposing Currents: The Politics of Water and Gender in Latin America. Edited by Vivienne Bennett, Sonia Dávila-Poblete, and María Nieves Rico. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2005. 264 pp. $27.95.

This book represents an important contribution to a growing subfield of feminist scholarship. Moving beyond a focus on the traditional policy areas normally associated with women and politics, the authors bring a gender analysis to bear on the “politics of water” in Latin America. Not only is this a policy issue not usually linked to women's rights, but, as the editors argue, even the national-level women's policy agencies created in many Latin American countries have overlooked the way gender discrimination impacts the heightening water crisis facing much of the region. Nevertheless, they maintain that “the right to water underpins all other social rights” (p. 15) and that “a gender perspective is not only possible but essential for effective water management” (p. ix).

Regulating Intimacy: A New Legal Paradigm. By Jean L. Cohen. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004. 304 pp.

Although Jean Cohen's book was originally published in 2002, her argument for a reformulated justification for the right to privacy seems more relevant than ever. The resignation of a key swing vote from the Supreme Court makes feminist concerns about the future of legal abortion seem all the more pressing. As her subtitle—“a new legal paradigm”—suggests, Cohen undertakes an ambitious project of reviving the right to privacy as a key feminist concept, while simultaneously attempting to rethink the nature and use of the law. Defending the reflexive paradigm of law, she argues that neither the liberal nor welfare paradigms of legal action is adequate for formulating solutions to privacy issues tinged with issues of gender equity, including abortion, sexual orientation law, and sexual harassment. The book's strength and weakness is its admirable breadth, as it tackles an impressive pantheon of legal theory, political philosophy, legal doctrine, and substantive legal and political issues. The author successfully refutes the liberal and welfarist paradigms but is less persuasive that the reflexive paradigm offers a way out of the dilemma.

Women Making Constitutions: New Politics and Comparative Perspectives. Edited by Alexandra Dobrowolsky and Vivien Hart. Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 277 pp. $90.00.

This edited volume addresses themes pertinent to all who study politics and gender, namely, how to incorporate claims for both equality and difference into politics, constitutional politics particularly. It achieves a difficult balance for any edited volume by discussing common themes and avoiding a focus on overly narrow debates. Thus, a range of problems and concepts are explored using empirical and theoretical research that provides a comprehensive insight into women's attempts to transform constitutions. The chapters are synthesized in the introduction and the conclusion, providing the reader with a more general insight. The editors highlight the tendency for mainstream analysis to oversimplify women's role in constitutional change. This theme is developed in other chapters. Anne Marie Goetz considers gender and accountability systems. She demonstrates the gendered assumptions underlying what is usually described as accountability failure. For example, should audit offices review whether resources are unequally distributed between the sexes?

Much of the scholarship on the modern Civil Rights Movement has recaptured dramatic and poignant events through eyewitness accounts and oral narratives—from letters, speeches, newspaper editorials, press releases, and photographs that summon vivid images of fire hoses and police dogs, peaceful protestors and violent rioters. The conventional approach (or master narrative) of civil rights history has focused almost exclusively upon the individual personalities and grassroots organizations that led the fight for equal protection under the law, desegregated lunch counters, and the right to vote in local and national elections. Rather than broaden and deepen our understanding of individual and collective forms of resistance, however, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history of black militancy and activism in the United States. Most people come to associate the modern Civil Rights Movement with the famous names, places, and events that made headlines during the turbulent 1950s and 1960s—the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi; Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott; Daisy Bates and the Little Rock Nine; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the March on Washington; Bob Moses and Freedom Summer; Gloria Richardson and the Cambridge Movement; and Fannie Lou Hamer at the 1964 National Democratic Convention—and not the ordinary men and women who risked their lives in the face of mob violence.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is in many ways the archetypal social movement organization (SMO), and it is unquestionably the premier SMO of the second wave of the women's movement. The story of NOW's founding has been told and retold many times, in part because it seems to embody many of the factors that scholars tell us are crucial for social movement (and thus, SMO) emergence: political opportunity (among other things, the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), communication networks (such as the U.S. and state-level Commissions on the Status of Women), patrons (e.g., organized labor), resources (via growing numbers of professional and working women), and so on.

The well-known analytical distinction drawn by Nancy Fraser between social movement struggles for recognition and those for redistribution is put to the test in this collection of essays drawn from a wide array of historical and case studies. In one sense, these are empirical studies that set out to confirm or to refute the analytical utility of distinguishing between economic and cultural injustice. If that premise alone bound the collection, it would be of limited interest. In another more expansive sense, these essays treat social movements as struggles for power and voice in political contexts, struggles that take shape in an always changing political landscape. Their strategies are determined more within the exigencies of politics than by fixed identities or visions of justice. The essays take a kind of political turn away from analytical and normative concerns that drive a great deal of the literature on social movements. It is perhaps overstating it a bit, but only a bit, to say that these essays disclose the fact that both recognition and redistribution are consequences of successful social movements, rather than their starting points. To be successful, social movements must act like any other collectivity by gaining power before they can secure justice.

In this intriguing, multilayered, and eloquent work situated in the Indian landscape, Nivedita Menon argues that “rights,” when bound up with law, are not in the service of emancipatory politics but rather of hegemonic projects, such as patriarchy and capitalist modernity, that legitimize only particular ways of being and doing. Rights are socially constructed and contextualized within particular moral universes, yet they lose their transformative potential when encapsulated in and institutionalized by the law, which is an exacting, universalizing discourse that fixes meanings and identities. Although feminists are increasingly invested in legal redress, any appeals to democracy, equality, and justice through the law, may have reached their discursive limits, requiring a renewed feminist emphasis on political struggle.

Julie Shayne's book focuses on the complex relationship between revolution and feminism. It examines women's contributions to revolutions and how revolutions relate to the emergence and consolidation of a feminist agenda. The book constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the role women play in revolutionary movements and how their experiences subsequently can transform society. Shayne presents an original, incisive analysis of three types of revolutionary experiences that she categorizes as negotiated (El Salvador), partial (Chile), and successful (Cuba).

This is perhaps the first comprehensive book on the subject of gender in Africa from a microeconomic perspective. Targeted toward upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, it provides an overview of many of the key debates among economists regarding gender and development. Although the book covers Africa as a whole, it also draws on insights based on extensive fieldwork Michael Kevane conducted in Burkina Faso and Sudan.