Women and Political Participation: Cultural Change in the Political Arena, by M. Margaret Conway, Gertrude A. Steuernagel, and David W. Ahern (CQ Press, 2005)

Women and Political Participation: Cultural Change in the Political Arena is an updated edition of the original text, first published in 1997, with new content and data that reflects not just gender, but age, ethnicity, and race as well. The authors have collected much of the nation's data on women in the political culture and summarized it into common and broader topical questions and titles. These include patterns of political participation, the relationship of feminist orientation attitudes with policy preferences, gender role expectations and political socialization, and the importance of looking into the past to see the future. Each tells the stories of all types of women and their political participation amidst the cultural change in the political arena, from activists like Barbara Jordon and Elizabeth Cady Stanton to mothers and friends. While these stories are important and serve to make the reader identify with the data, summarizing the data consumes the book. However, by providing a summarization of such vast data, the book might be helpful to those with little knowledge of women in the political arena and a great starting place to find resources for more focused topics in women's political participation.

Reviewed by Jennifer Wong

I Have Been Waiting: Race and U.S. Higher Education, by Jennifer S. Simpson (University of Toronto Press, 2003)

Simpson begins her book with a powerful and relevant quote, and ends with another. In her Preface, she describes a meeting of faculty, administrators, students, staff, and board members to discuss hiring practices and campus climate generally. During the meeting, a female African American student stood up and said, "I have been waiting for the day when white folks start to deal with their own racism." Simpson writes that this statement continues to affect her in significant ways, both in how it leads her to constantly assess, interrogate, and be aware of her own identity as a white woman, and because she is grateful that this woman was still waiting. The final quote, spoken by her dissertation adviser, is equally as powerful and influential in Simpson's life. The adviser said, "Racism is not a theory." These five words lift racism out of a purely intellectual and theoretical realm, and place it squarely in the world of lived experience, of feeling and knowing racism on all levels--emotionally, psychologically, physically, spiritually, and intellectually. In its way, it is a call to action, an iteration of the need to do something beyond simply think, depersonalize, and make abstract. It is the potently succinct declaration of what people of color already know and what most whites do not want to confront

The content of Simpson's book contains explorations and explications of the intersections of race and higher education, and the ways in which higher education's structure continues to privilege and normalize whiteness, while silencing, marginalizing, and excluding others. Her goal is to get white people to interrogate their privilege and their connections to historical racism, to get professors to make whiteness visible by bringing race into the classroom in different ways, and to change the current norms, structures, and discourses in higher education so that they are not only genuinely inclusive, but also genuinely critical. Each chapter not only includes an in-depth intellectual exploration of a particular theme or idea, but also shares examples of what racism, privilege, and whiteness can look like in the classroom. Simpson calls on white faculty, administrators, and students to be more intentional, more critical, and more aware of how they live their privilege, of ways their privilege can harm and exclude others, and of ways they can begin to dismantle this privilege. Following the primary text is a compilation of discussion questions, exercises, and assignments for faculty to use in their classrooms, as well as strategies for incorporating this work into their classrooms.

Reviewed by Amy N. Addams