ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, the introduction to the text, lays out the plan of the book and its major theoretical foci. This book is about how women practice politics and use their voices in contemporary American politics. It takes a broad view of what constitutes political practice, an essential task if one is to take women’s citizenship seriously; assesses trends in women’s activism and their current status in the public realm; and considers their efforts to achieve equality a half-century after the beginning of the second women’s rights movement in the 1960s. The chapter also lays out a parallel economic phenomenon of this time, the rise in economic inequality, and assesses its impact of women’s quests for political equality and public leadership and how women’s involvement in the economic life of the nation has affected the contours of the era of economic inequality. Thus, political and economic trends are intertwined in Women and Politics: A Quest for Political Equality in an Age of Economic Inequality.
