ABSTRACT
Women have a long history of being excluded from consideration of what legitimately was incorporated in the study of politics, meaning that the ideas, institutions and processes constituting official politics largely ignored gender inequality in the distribution of political power. For centuries it was assumed that only men would inhabit the public arena, where ‘politics’ was performed. While early liberal thinkers advocated representative rather than participatory democracy, most assumed that the process of representation would be undertaken only by men. John Stuart Mill was one of the few who argued that every citizen, including women, not only ought to have a voice in the exercise of government, but at least occasionally ought to take part in government ‘by the personal discharge of some public function, local or general’.1
