Feminists and Party Politics

Margaret Conrad is a professor of history at Acadia University. She is
the author of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800, and Making Adjustments: Change and Continuity in
Planter Nova Scotia, 1759–1800 and the co

While there is little question that the women’s movement has had an
enormous impact on work and family life in recent decades, its success
in reshaping political parties and the informal power relations that
sustain them has been mixed. This book assesses the impact of feminism
on party politics in both Canada and the United States between 1970 and
1997. By taking a comparative approach, Lisa Young offers important
insights on a hitherto underexplored topic. Young positions her
meticulously researched study in theoretical approaches to gender and
movements, using a “political opportunity structure” to organize her
findings. Although the careful attention to theory and method can
sometimes make for difficult reading, the book is well organized and
clearly written.

The author begins her study by asking whether feminists can reasonably
expect to change party politics. Unlike liberal feminists who remain
optimistic about the possibility of political reform, radical and
postmodern theorists maintain that party politics is inherently
patriarchal and therefore beyond feminist redemption. Young concludes
that the less-optimistic view is to some extent confirmed by her finding
that there is an inverse relationship between the number of women in
partisan politics and the responsiveness of parties to feminist
policies, other than the obvious one of having more women in public
life. Moreover, the fact that many women in formal politics are either
unaware of, or hostile to, feminist goals suggests that the
opportunities for electoral benefit from embracing feminism are
diminishing.

One of the most interesting findings of this rich study is that the
Canadian women’s movement is more diverse and less directly engaged in
partisan politics, especially in recent times, than its American
counterpart. In the United States, most feminists are aligned with the
Democratic Party, while in Canada the success of new parties in the
1990s has helped to marginalize feminist issues, which remain a central
focus only in the NDP. In neither country, Young concludes, have any
major political parties been transformed by the contemporary women’s
movement. This finding comes as no surprise, but this well-argued
monograph makes a major contribution to helping us understand why.