Gender is one of the primary fault lines running through contemporary American politics. The political agenda has become deeply polarized by such issues as affirmative action, abortion rights, and welfare reform. In short, gender politics, once regarded as marginal, has emerged as one of the core dividing lines in identifying politicians, parties, issues, and voters in America. Not surprising, the way media covers gender politics has long been a matter of contention. The issue at the heart of this book is whether, as critics suggest, media coverage of women in America reinforces rather than challenges the dominant culture, thereby contributing towards women's marginalization in public life. This collection of original essays by twenty-one top academics and journalists is the first book to systematically examine the impact of the media on women's power in America. It focuses on how the role of American women as citizens, political leaders, and feminist activists has been influenced by the media, for better or worse, in recent decades. Using multimethod approaches involving surveys, content analysis, focus groups, interviews, and personal experience, the authors analyze the role of women as journalists, the impact of campaign coverage, images of women in power, and coverage of women's movement and feminist policy issues. Women, Media, and Politics will be an important resource for students interested in contemporary political and social debate.

Although women constitute half of the world's population, their participation in the political sphere remains problematic. While existing research on women politicians from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada sheds light on the challenges and opportunities they face, we still have a very limited understanding of women's political participation in emerging democracies. Women in Politics and Media: Perspectives From Nations in Transition is the first collection to de-Westernize the scholarship on women, politics and media by: 1) highlighting the latest research on countries and regions that have not been 'the usual suspects'; 2) featuring a diverse group of scholars, many of non-Western origin; 3) giving voice through personal interviews to politically active women, thus providing the reader with a rare insight into women's agency in the political structures of emerging democracies. Each chapter examines the complex women, politics and media dynamic in a particular nation-state, taking into consideration the specific political, historic and social context. With 23 case studies and interviews from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Central and Eastern Europe, Asia, Russia and the former Soviet republics, this volume will be of interest to students, media scholars and policy makers from developed and emerging democracies.

All American politicians face the glare of media coverage, both in running for office and in representing their constituents if elected. But for women seeking or holding high public office, as Maria Braden demonstrates, the scrutiny by newspapers and television can be both withering and damaging—a fact that has changed little over the decades despite the emergence of more women in politics and more women in the news media. Particularly disturbing is the fact that the increase in the number of women reporters appears to have had little effect on the way women candidates are portrayed in the media. Some women reporters, in fact, seem intent on proving that they can be just as tough on women candidates as their male counterparts, thus perpetuating the misrepresentations of the past. Braden examines the political fortunes of Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. House; those of the congressional "glamour girls" of the 1940s, Clare Boothe Luce and Helen Gahagan Douglas; the long Senate career of Margaret Chase Smith; the political struggles of diverse women of more recent decades, including Bella Abzug, Elizabeth Holtzman, Nancy Kassebaum, Barbara Jordan, Dianne Feinstein, and Ann Richards; and the disastrous vice presidential bid of Geraldine Ferraro. Braden traces a persistent double standard in media coverage of women's political campaigns through the past eighty years. Journalists dwell on the candidates' novelty in public office and describe them in ways that stereotype and trivialize them. Especially demeaning are comments on women's appearance, personality, and family connections— comments of a sort that would rarely be made about men candidates. Are they too pretty or too plain? What do their clothes say about them? Are they "feminine" enough or "too masculine"? Are they still just ordinary housewives or are they neglecting their families by heading for Washington or the state house? Braden's study is based on both media accounts and the revealing personal interviews she conducted with a broad range of recent women politicians, including Margaret Chase Smith, Bella Abzug, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Nancy Kassebaum, and Ann Richards. All describe agonizing struggles to get across to the public the message that they are serious and competent candidates capable of holding high office and shaping our nation's course.

The book argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, the candidate's sex plays a minimal role in the majority of US elections.

Written in a clear and accessible style, with lots of examples from Anglo-American media, Gender and the Media offers a critical introduction to the study of gender in the media, and an up-to-date assessment of the key issues and debates. Eschewing a straightforwardly positive or negative assessment the book explores the contradictory character of contemporary gender representations, where confident expressions of girl power sit alongside reports of epidemic levels of anorexia among young women, moral panics about the impact on men of idealized representations of the 'six-pack', but near silence about the pervasive re-sexualization of women's bodies, along with a growing use of irony and playfulness that render critique extremely difficult. The book looks in depth at five areas of media - talk shows, magazines, news, advertising, and contemporary screen and paperback romances - to examine how representations of women and men are changing in the twenty-first century, partly in response to feminist, queer and anti-racist critique. Gender and the Media is also concerned with the theoretical tools available for analysing representations. A range of approaches from semiotics to postcolonial theory are discussed, and Gill asks how useful notions such as objectification, backlash, and positive images are for making sense of gender in today's Western media. Finally, Gender and the Media also raises questions about cultural politics - namely, what forms of critique and intervention are effective at a moment when ironic quotation marks seem to protect much media content from criticism and when much media content - from Sex and the City to revenge adverts - can be labelled postfeminist. This is a book that will be of particular interest to students and scholars in gender and media studies, as well as those in sociology and cultural studies more generally.

In the century since women were first eligible to stand and vote in British general elections, they have relied on news media to represent their political perspectives in the public realm. This book provides a systematic analysis of electoral coverage by charting how women candidates, voters, politicians' spouses, and party leaders have been portrayed in newspapers since 1918. The result is a fascinating account of both continuity and change in the position of women in British politics. The book demonstrates that for women to be effectively represented in the political domain, they must also be effectively represented in the public discussion of politics that takes place in the media.

Despite decades of women’s participation in politics and the increasing number of LGBTQ individuals who are seeking and winning political office, the gender identities of Canadian politicians continue to attract media and public attention and shape the way these individuals are perceived and evaluated. Gendered Mediation takes an original, intersectional approach to these issues by building upon the gendered mediation thesis to argue that political communication and reporting reinforces impressions of politics as a masculine domain that privileges men and treats women as outsiders. Organized into three sections, the book investigates politicians’ gendered strategies for shaping their own and others’ public images, the gendered characteristics of media coverage of politicians, and voter reactions to these self-presentations and media depictions. By examining how sexuality, race, age, and class intersect with gender to produce differing political identities and responses, the contributors make new theoretical and empirical interventions into research on gender and political communication. Their findings have profound implications for democracy not only in Canada but for democratic political systems elsewhere.

Women and American Politics brings together leading scholars in the field of women and politics to provide an account of recent developments and the challenges that the future brings for the study of gender and American Politics. The book examines women's participation in the electoral arena and the emerging scholarship on the relationship between the media and women in politics, the participation of women of colour, and women's activism outside the electoral arena. This volume demonstrates both the wealth of knowledge about women and American politics by the current generation of scholars and the vast number and range of important research questions, which pose a challenge for the next generation.

"Women have made significant inroads into politics in recent years, but in many parts of the world, their increased engagement has spurred physical attacks, intimidation, and harassment intended to deter their participation. This book provides the first comprehensive account of this phenomenon, exploring how women came to give these experiences a name - violence against women in politics - and lobbied for its increased recognition by citizens, states, and international organizations. Tracing how this concept emerged inductively on the global stage, the volume draws on research in multiple disciplines to resolve lingering ambiguities regarding its contours. It argues that this phenomenon is not simply a gendered extension of existing definitions of political violence privileging physical aggressions against political rivals. Rather, violence against women in politics is a distinct phenomenon involving a broad range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors. Drawing on a wide range of country examples, the book illustrates what this violence looks like in practice, as well as catalogues emerging solutions around the world. Issuing a call to action, it considers how to document this phenomenon more effectively, as well as understand the political and social implications of allowing violence against women in politics to continue unabated. Highlighting the threats it poses to democracy, human rights, and gender equality, the volume concludes that tackling violence against women in politics requires ongoing dialogue and collaboration to ensure women's equal rights to participate - freely and safely - in political life around the globe"--

Women and Politics: Paths to Power and Political Influence examines the role of women in politics from the early women's movements to the female politicians in power today. The revised fourth edition includes: a new preface analyzing the 2020 elections, focusing on the historic victory of Kamala Harris and the gendered and racist critiques she endured on the campaign trail. recognition of the centennial of women's suffrage, with greater attention to Black and Indigenous women's often overlooked contributions to the fight for suffrage and expanded rights election results from the historic 2020 elections when more women filed congressional candidacies than ever before and women’s numbers in both Congress and state legislatures reached record highs. analysis of the gender gap in voting in 2020, focusing on both race and gender. updates reflecting President Biden's historic cabinet picks, including Deb Haaland as the first Native American to lead the Department of the Interior and Janet Yellen as the first woman to lead the Treasury Department. coverage of the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the nomination and confirmation of her replacement, Amy Coney Barrett.