ABSTRACT
Women's political participation has been viewed by as a function of women's stake in the political system, either resulting from their activity outside the home or the politicization of the issues in which they were traditionally interested. The interest in international politics is a timely one. Feminist political geography, as can be seen from its meagre output so far, has much catching up to do. Women's oppression was one of the questions added to an extended political agenda. Despite political science's new-found concern with how agendas were drawn up, by whom and in whose interest, feminist challenges to male-stream research were slow in coming forth. Whilst the early empirical studies of women and politics tended to adopt the public-private distinction more or less unequivocally, feminist critiques of the classic political philosophers from the Greeks to the social-contract theorists have subjected the distinction to careful scrutiny.
