Abstract
Scholars have produced a rich literature examining ways in which organized feminists influence government policy. An important sub-segment within this literature takes a cross-national approach, comparing countries to discern broad global patterns in the circumstances motivating governments to enact women-friendly law and policy. Mala Htun and Laurel Weldon’s new volume, The Logics of Gender Justice: State Action on Women’s Rights around the World, offers an important addition to this body of scholarship. Their work draws on data from 70 countries to discern how “gender justice” in policy-making can be achieved. Their data span a broad time frame, from 1975 to 2005, and their selection of nations encompasses 85 percent of the world’s population. The authors draw their data from a variety of sources: for example, legislative and court documents, media accounts, law review articles, labor codes, and existing women’s rights databases. A work of this scope with its detailed and rigorous analyses provides authoritative insights into the types of contexts that can result in greater rights and equality for women around the world.
At the heart of Htun and Weldon’s contribution is a typology of the contexts facilitating and hindering feminist policy change. In defining their typology, the authors discuss three core dimensions along which societies can vary: the degree to which the national culture values or devalues women (that is, the nature of a country’s gender status hierarchy); the extent to which a society shifts authority to distribute critical resources from the marketplace to the state in order to move toward less class inequality, which Htun and Weldon label as the nation’s “class politics”; and the degree to which religious institutions exert their doctrinal beliefs in the society. As the authors’ analyses demonstrate, where a nation is situated along these three dimensions plays a pronounced role in shaping gender-based policy outcomes. Additionally, and importantly, the authors’ typology also helps us make sense of which groups in society, beyond feminist activists, are likely to mobilize for and against specific policy proposals. Indeed, this is where Htun and Weldon’s scholarship provides its greatest insights.
As the authors acknowledge, women’s rights organizations are typically at the forefront of efforts to enact women-friendly policy. But other groups enter the struggle as well. And characteristics of the national context, as they are arrayed along the three dimensions in Htun and Weldon’s typology, explain where and when other groups are motivated to enter into policy debates. For example, when proposed policy to increase women’s equality presents a core challenge to religious doctrine, such as policy concerning abortion rights, traditional religious groups commonly play pronounced roles in the policy debates; and often religious groups can stall policy change to grant women reproductive rights. When proposed policy is likely to be most beneficial to working-class and/or lower-income women, such as family or maternity leave or childcare policy, pro-labor political parties frequently become activated, and their presence in the policy debate can increase the likelihood of such policy being enacted. Policy to combat violence against women challenges traditional assumptions about the status of women in society but not, in many cases, according to the authors, religious doctrine or state-market relations, and thus such policy battles are often left to women’s and feminist groups alone to obtain from the government. Htun and Weldon’s volume’s utility, then, is in helping us see how variation in a nation’s broader context influences activation of specific groups in particular policy debates, which can then facilitate or hinder passage of the policies.
In addition, the book offers insights into important global patterns in specific areas of policy development. For example, the book’s findings show a strong positive relationship between Left political parties and the presence of national family leave policy. Yet at the same time, the volume’s results do not reveal a relationship between Left parties and policy expanding access to childcare. This might at first seem puzzling. But Htun and Weldon posit that Left parties may be more willing to work for family leave policy, which can allow women to remain at home to care for young children, rather than childcare provisions, which permit women with young children to work outside the home.
At times in reading the volume, one might want more discussion of the overlap among the three dimensions of the typology, that is, among the gender status, class politics, and religious doctrine dimensions. For example, religious doctrines may also define gender status hierarchies, making the distinction between these two dimensions at times less clear. Class politics as well may be intertwined with gender status hierarchies. For instance, perhaps the reason Left parties prefer family leave over childcare policy is due to assumptions about appropriate roles for women who are mothers of young children—in particular, that such women are better off in the home rather than in workplace. This suggests that class politics and gender status can be closely intertwined. The authors, to their credit, acknowledge how gender status, class, and religious hierarchies can overlap to produce complex national contexts. Pursuing deeper understanding of the overlap (the intersections) among these dimensions (and likely other dimensions as well—for instance, race, ethnicity, citizenship status, etc.) is likely to inform the scholarship of researchers who build on the important insights of Htun and Weldon.
Additionally, although the authors’ data span four decades (with data for the years 1975, 1985, 1995, and 2005), in their overarching argument little is made of the temporal nature of the data. Given that this is a period overall of rapid change in women’s rights, I hope that the authors have future plans to explore how their findings might vary across periods.
Overall, however, this work provides a significant addition to cross-national studies of gendered policy-making. This is a growing field, and Htun and Weldon’s new volume offers an important typology for making sense of global patterning in gender justice policy—policy designed to reduce gender inequality and combat violence against women.