Feminists and Party Politics

The contemporary women's movement has transformed North American society. Change has been the greatest in the realm of everyday life, but feminists' insistence that "the personal is political" has challenged the substance and practice of politics. Feminists and Party Politics examines the effort to bring feminism into the formal political arena through established North American political parties. Two major sets of questions lie at the heart of this inquiry. First, how have movement organizations approached partisan and electoral politics? To what extent have they tried to change parties? And secondly, how have parties themselves responded to the mobilization of feminism? Based upon numerous interviews with feminists and partisan activists, archival and documentary material, and analysis of attitudinal surveys of political elites, Lisa Young's suggestive research makes a significant contribution to the study of gender politics. Lisa Young is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary.