ABSTRACT
In traditional political science, the state has long been regarded as a privileged site of political participation and representative democracy. Hence, apart from focusing on voting, parties and pressure groups, studies of political participation have emphasised the importance of involvement in state structures and processes in order to assess the contribution of various social groups or classes to the preservation or transformation of political life and of society in general. In examining political participation in the state, traditional political science has paid very little, if any, attention to women’s political involvement. On the basis of crude sex-stereotyping, it has argued that women are uninterested in, uninformed about or psychologically unsuited to politics and therefore, that their levels of participation are low and by implication unworthy of study. The French political scientist, Maurice Duverger, who synthesised the findings of a UNESCOfunded survey in the 1950s of women’s political participation in France, the German Federal Republic, Norway and Yugoslavia, noted, ‘the survey seems to have encountered . . . a certain degree of indifference. The political scientists and most of the organisations invited to supply information often tended to regard its purpose as a secondary one, of no intrinsic importance’ (1955b: 8). Such indifference and dismissiveness were also clearly demonstrated by Mattei Dogan (1955: 292) who studied the social background of deputies elected in June 1951, but who refused to include women, arguing that not only did they form a mere 3.5 per cent of deputies but that most of them were housewives rather than professionholders. Where traditional political science has shown an interest in women, it has only done so in order to demonstrate women’s similarity to or difference from men’s political behaviour (taken to be the norm) within a strictly defined ‘political’ sphere. For example, Duverger’s study, mentioned above, does just that.
