ABSTRACT
The essays in this volume raise questions for all who study American politics, in which gender continues to play a critical but often incompletely understood role. The volume offers a set of challenges to the discipline of political science regarding the integration of the study of gender into the study of American political life. In each of the three arenas addressed by this volume-political behavior, public policy, and institutions-gender is often an afterthought, if it is thought of at all, for many American politics researchers despite the fact that, as this volume indicates, gender is a significant element in politics in all of these areas. Political science still has much to learn from feminist approaches to research, and here we wish to suggest some fruitful directions for this inquiry. As we suggested in the Introduction, gender politics scholarship has most often been done by scholars, both women and men, who are themselves feminist, and who have a normative as well as an intellectual interest in women's political life. In that spirit, the foregoing chapters also raise a series of questions for those concerned with the feminist movement and with women's political progress and equality.
