It may be an unfortunate commentary on our achievements as “scientists”, but an American government textbook tends to be a rather topical document, and the ones that are good enough to justify the effort must be updated every several years, in order to maintain their competitive position. One of the best, I think, and surely one of the ones most highly recommended to me by other political scientists, was Marian Irish and James Prothro's The Politics of American Democracy (Prentice-Hall: 4th edn., 1968; 5th edn., 1971). I used the 1968 edition in classes several times, with such satisfaction that I ordered the new fifth edition in the summer of 1971, sight unseen. As the following comments indicate, I had reason to regret the decision. Since textbooks are rarely reviewed, and since Prentice-Hall reports that this edition will be current through 1975, I have reluctantly chosen this medium to bring some rather strange attributes of this book to the attention of the political science community.

In common with many of the texts that have appeared in the last one or two years, the authors have gone to considerable effort to make their new edition more relevant to the great political disturbances we have just experienced and — to a lesser extent — are still experiencing: ghetto riots, the Vietnam peace movement, and women's liberation.

Academicians are properly suspicious of efforts to characterize all the intellectual currents of a decade by a single phrase. But perhaps our less cautious friends in journalism are not so far wrong in suggesting that we are returning in the 1970s to the conservatism of the 1950s. The first edition of The Politics of American Democracy (1959) was denounced by a John Birch group in California for its left-wing orientation. The only previous broadside attack on the book to appear in print was directed at the third and fourth editions (1965, 1968); this attack, which appeared in a 1970 issue of the Newsletter of the Caucus for a New Political Science, denounced the book for its right-wing, pro-system biases. Now we have come full circle and find the fifth (1971) edition denounced because “spokesmen of the left seem to have been given more than equal time.” In some respects we are gratified to think Mr. Stevens' critique must prove we have not grown more conservative with each edition, and we shall certainly display his comments to our children, nieces, nephews, junior colleagues, and students.

More seriously, however, we cannot be gratified to have our scholarship and our integrity impugned. We do not wish to overreact, but the charge that we are guilty of “bizarre statements of ‘fact’ and misrepresentations of the academic literature” and the suggestion that we “can no longer claim to be speaking as … political scientists[s]” can hardly be interpreted to mean that we have merely slipped into occasional error.

For the past few years, women political scientists have been working for measures to improve their professional status and increase opportunities available to them in the discipline. The national and regional political science associations have demonstrated their willingness to explore existing situations disadvantageous to women by the appointment of Committees on the Status of Women (CsSW). The regional committees have recently collected a variety of information on the employment status of political scientists in each of three regions. The availability of their reports prompted the Editor of PS to ask me to prepare a summary statement on the current status of women in the profession. In order to provide a more comprehensive discussion I have also assembled some additional data and indicators and the APSA national office kindly provided some data from the 1972–73 Department Chairmen's questionnaire.