ABSTRACT
Many feminist researchers feel a profound ambivalence toward the social capital literature. 1 On the one hand, this literature signals a rediscovery of the importance of social relationships and interconnectedness for understanding political life, a direction that many feminist researchers have been advocating for some time. On the other hand, much of the social capital literature, and particularly the work of Robert Putnam, is rooted in nostalgia for a golden era, which, if it ever existed, was predicated on women's exclusion from the fully public sphere of politics. This ambivalence is apparent in many of the contributions to this book.
