ABSTRACT
While there have been some important critiques of the way that governance practices can act to obscure women's relative economic disadvantage and to create moral discourses that penalise women, the literature on governance has broadly neglected the issue of gender. Women's exclusion from political life and the public realm has been a longstanding concern and significant flaw within democracy. The extension of suffrage to different groups of women has occurred at various points in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, emphasising the ongoing struggles for full political recognition. The feminist movement continues to change, partly in relation to altering historical circumstances, partly in response to challenges from within, with those raised by black feminist thought being particularly important. The conflicting logic of representation through presence contributes to women in the built environment often being seen to be a specialist concern or interest.
