Women's Political Power Research Articles

The Role of Education in Fostering Political Empowerment among the Female School Teachers in Newly Merged Districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa

One of the fundamental institutions that exist in one form or another in every society on the planet is education. The present research focuses on how education supports women's political empowerment in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's newly merged districts. The study's main goal was to determine how education contributes to the political empowerment of female teachers in the targeted community. In a similar vein, the study's goal was to ascertain how teachers in the research area support women's political empowerment. The research was quantitative in nature, and 225 sample size (female teachers) were chosen from the three districts of Bajawar, Kurram, and Mohmmand using the Sekran sample size determination table. The data were collected through structured questionnaires from (Primary, Middle, and High) school teachers, which were then analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) software. The analyzed data were then presented in the form of tables and frequencies. The researched data demonstrates that in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa's newly merged districts, education may promote women's political empowerment in the true sense. It is advised that training, seminars, and awareness-raising events on the value of education and how it gives women political power be required for both the general public and female teachers.

Terentia and the Bona Dea: Women's Public Power in the Late Roman Republic

Abstract: This paper challenges older views that women's political power in the late Roman Republic was exercised mainly behind the scenes and had to be, because women could not have publicly acknowledged power. First, ancient historiography is used to recover a model of politics, according to which women's interventions gained urgency when made in public. Then, case studies explore how high-ranking women ( matronae ) used the annual rites for the Bona Dea to contribute to public life and intervene in politics. Later accounts of the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 b.c.e. positively recalled actions of Cicero's wife Terentia and her peers.

Navigating underrepresentation and gendered barriers to women's political power: Narratives and experiences of women parliamentarians in Turkey

As women increasingly participate in political decision-making around the world, the research emphasizes the need to further understand how informal barriers shape women's political participation. At the same time, the persistent stability of hybrid political regimes calls for additional inquiry into the impact of hybrid regimes on gender politics and its actors. Based on the case of Turkey, a hybrid regime, this study explores how women MPs navigate gendered, informal obstacles in parliament and to what extent their navigation strategies reflect the broader implications posed by the hybrid regime context. This exploratory study draws on qualitative, in-depth semi-structured interviews with eight women MPs in the Turkish parliament from government and opposition parties. The findings illustrate that navigating the informal barriers women MPs experience in the Turkish parliament happens both individually and in collective ways. Individually, women MPs choose to navigate the informal barriers of gender norms by either assimilating or contrasting the masculine way of doing politics. Collective navigation strategies of women MPs in the Turkish parliament illustrate their approaches to representing women's interests, seeking women's solidarity across the parliament, and linkages with civil society to empower women, which also reflect the different positionings of government and opposition within the Turkish hybrid regime dynamics. The findings reveal the need to further research the complex, dynamic interplay of how informal practices and hybrid regime tactics target gender politics and its actors, while also giving more attention to women's agency in tackling and countering obstacles to their political power within and beyond political institutions.

Domesticity and Political Participation: At Home with the Jacobin Women

The exclusion of women from political participation and the separation of private and public spheres seem anchored in human history to such an extent that we may think they are necessary. I offer an analysis of a philosophical moment in history, the early years of the French Revolution, where politics and domesticity were not incompatible. I show how this enabled women to participate in politics from within their homes, at the same time fulfilling their duties as wives and mothers. The republican home, on this interpretation, was a place of power and virtue, a merging of the public and the private sphere where political ideals and reforms could be born and nurtured. This conception of the home was derived in great part from a reading of Rousseau’s writings on motherhood. As the influence of French revolutionary women became more visible, they were severely repressed. The fact that they could not hold on to a position of power that derived naturally from the ideals they and others defended, I will suggest, was caused both by the fact that the framework used to allow women political power was insecure, and by the gradual replacement of republican ideals by liberal ones.

Maternal Mortality and Women's Political Power

Millions of women continue to die during and soon after childbirth, even where the knowledge and resources to avoid this are available. We posit that raising the share of women in parliament can trigger action. Leveraging the timing of gender quota legislation across developing countries, we identify sharp sustained reductions of 8–10 percent in maternal mortality. Investigating mechanisms, we find that gender quotas lead to increases in percentage points of 5–8 in skilled birth attendance and 4–8 in prenatal care utilization, alongside a decline in fertility of 6–7 percent and an increase in the schooling of young women of about 0.5 years. The results are robust to numerous robustness checks. They suggest a new policy tool for tackling maternal mortality.

Kekuatan Politik Perempuan dalam Organisasi Partai Keadilan Sejahtera (PKS) di Kabupaten Gorontalo

The purpose of this study is to know the political power of women in the organization of Prosperous Justice Party (PKS) in Gorontalo District. The research method used is quantitative method, and research type is descriptive. Data collection using questionnaires, interviews, observation and documentation. The research informant is the leader of the PKS Party of Gorontalo district. The result of the research shows that 1) the representation of women in the governance of the PKS party in Gorontalo Regency has not been able to fulfill women's representation 30% in the management of political parties according to Law no. 2 Year 2008 Jo. Law no. 2 Year 2011 on Political Parties. 2) There are four factors that inhibit the fulfillment of 30% of women's representation until it is not fulfilled: First, from the normative point, the Law regulating it is Law no. 2 Year 2008 Jo. UU no. 2 Year 2011 on political parties is not effective in the implementation process. Second, the cultural factor, patriarchal culture, where is men have a higher position than women; third, the Political Party Factor itself. The party sometimes never gives women the opportunity to occupy strategic positions in party stewardship so women are sometimes overlooked; and fourth, the factor of the woman's personal. Indonesian women are still a lot of pessimists or feel afraid of themselves.

Sharers in the Divine Image: Francisco Suárez and the Justification of Female Political Authority

ABSTRACT Unlike the perceived stance of many of his scholastic predecessors and contemporaries, Suárez denies the claim that women are mentally inferior to women, and therefore argues that they enjoy full political authority. In this paper, I explore how scholastic theological resources and canon law sources, as well as his own conception of communal political power, enabled Suarez to make this argument. I also consider how his theologically-grounded support of full political power for women proves an exception to some current critical views of scholastic approaches to women’s political power.

Study on Heroine Discourse under the Kim Jong Un Regime: Focusing on Articles of Women of Joseon

For an overview of women`s policy in North Korea, 60 volumes of Women of Joseon (2012.1-2016.12) were subject to analysis. The journal has been the exemplary model that puts across the authority`s policy and explores various types of the heroine to push for a “learn from the heroine campaign.” The heroines in the journal articles can be categorized into five types of ideal womanhood - the hardworking woman, the woman revolutionary, the professional woman, the good wife and wise mother, and the woman supporting the military and volunteering. Those five types are used to examine the policy intentions of the North Korean authorities. The analysis of policy intentions found the collapse of conventional gender-based boundaries of labor areas; the spread of the Stakhanov movement; the propagation of the theory of the great family and paternalism of women; and succession by the third generation and political power of women. Like other socialist states, the North Korea advocates gender equality through policies. However, in reality, it defines its view towards women under its unique propaganda called “Juche Idea”, so that North Korean women are dominated by patriarchal ideology that prioritizes the father (the leader) and are socially restrained to realize themselves within the boundaries of the party and organization. They are also haunted by the male-centered patriarchal view of the family and undertake production activities in the labor force while simultaneously handling housework and childcare. Worse yet, women are faced with hardworking competition, production-quotas, and ideology-learning programs that aim to cover the shortcomings of the social economic system and maximize the use of labor forces causing women to be burdened with a double and even triple whammy.

Political Empowerment, Rule of Law, and Women's Entry into Entrepreneurship

Women's political leadership may contribute to women's entrepreneurship by removing existing constraints on the economic behavior of women, assuming these changes are then enforced. We examine the association of women's political power and a country's rule of law with women's entrepreneurial entry, using the lobal ntrepreneurship onitor dataset combined with other indicators. Both variables are positively associated with women's entry into entrepreneurship, and the association between political empowerment. Entry into entrepreneurship is moderated by rule of law, with higher levels of women's political power having greater effects in countries with higher levels of rule of law. Implications are discussed.

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

The Past, Present, and Future of the American Left

The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria Brooke Heidenreich Findley Adams, Tracy . The Life and Afterlife of Isabeau of Bavaria. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. PP xi-xxvi; 338. ISBN 978-0-8018-9625-5. $55 (Cloth). This fascinating and meticulously researched book takes a fresh look at the career of one of France's more controversial queens. Isabeau of Bavaria, wife of the "mad" Charles VI, who reigned from 1380-1422, and mother of Charles VII, who would eventually claim his throne in 1429 with the help of Joan of Arc, has been the victim of a black legend that, as Adams convincingly demonstrates, is both tenacious and unfounded. Examining the evidence with thoroughness and clarity, Adams shows that Isabeau was respected and beloved during her lifetime, serving as regent during her husband's episodes of madness, and working tirelessly to mediate in the feud between Armagnac and Burgundian factions that was the defining conflict of French politics at the time. Yet after her death she gained a reputation as dissipated, adulterous, and treacherous. Adams' compelling recounting of Isabeau's life and her posthumous transformation is a sobering reminder of the ways in which the telling of history is shaped by ideology. The first two chapters of the book survey Isabeau's "life" and "afterlife." While Isabeau's career as a mediator queen was ultimately not a successful one, Adams argues that this "must be attributed to bad luck rather than incompetence" (36); had any number of factors turned out differently, she might have been remembered today as an exceptional and influential figure. Adams uses Pierre Nora's theory of the lieu de mémoire to explain the development of Isabeau's black legend, arguing provocatively that the queen's actions have been understood in hindsight as acts of treachery against the "French," even as the "French" have been arbitrarily defined as the winning faction in the Armagnac-Burgundian feud (the Armagnacs). "As a lieu de mémoire [Isabeau] has served from the very beginning as a repoussoir against which to construct French identity, and thus the created meaning of her career has always been more significant than the truth" (39). Adams then devotes an additional six chapters to closer examinations of important aspects of Isabeau's career. While such an arrangement might be seen as repetitive (and indeed this reader spent some time flipping back and forth), it does have the advantage of being extremely clear and accessible to those who are not familiar with Isabeau, first building a broad foundation before proceeding to more detail. Studies of the role of the mediator queen in its medieval context, Isabeau's contemporary reputation, and her handling of the [End Page 104] kidnapping of the dauphin Louis by the Burgundian faction in 1405, are all compelling and clearly researched, while a look at Isabeau's personality, physique and relationships and their subsequent distortion by historians makes for fascinating reading. Perhaps the crux of the book, however, is Adams' examination of the circumstances leading up to the treaty of Troyes, the 1420 document in which Isabeau withdrew her support from her son, the future Charles VII, thus placing herself on the losing side of history (ch. 7). As Adams shows, while Charles VII's eventual victory, aided by that defining symbol of Frenchness, Joan of Arc, made Isabeau's action seem treasonous in retrospect, within the volatile and uncertain climate in which it was made, the queen's decision was an attempt at peacekeeping and mediation. Finally, Adams not only repudiates the black legend that has clouded Isabeau's memory, but argues convincingly that the queen "is worthy of interest for reasons beyond the mythology that surrounds her and that her career merits further study" (249). As Adams argues in her conclusion, Isabeau's roles as regent and mediator queen can help us understand women's political power in the fifteenth century. Ultimately, Adams' book becomes a fascinating study of historiography as well as an important work of historical scholarship in its own right. The shaping of Isabeau's posthumous legend around an arbitrary and historically contingent definition of Frenchness reminds us that history is written by...

<i>Ogimah Ikwe</i>: Native Women and Their Path to Leadership

Ogimah Ikwe: Native Women and Their Path to Leadership Denise K. Lajimodiere (bio) Much documentation gathered on Native American women's activities originated in the journals of European male missionaries and explorers. These first visitors observed Native societies through the eyes of their own culture, a culture in which male activities were the only happenings of note. 1 This bias led to indirect and distorted descriptions of Native American women's activities and beliefs. 2 Scholars who study Native American women today have made significant inroads into their histories; however, many interpretations remain incorrect and undeveloped. Devon Mihesuah states, "Because many authors write from a patriarchal or white feminist perspective, the value of Indian women is vastly underrated." 3 Gretchen Bataille and Kathleen Sands address this shortcoming, saying, "The portrayal of American Indian women in North America over the last four centuries offers an uneven body of documentary evidence about the lives of Native women as individuals and members of their group." 4 This study's purpose is to increase the visibility of Native American women in leadership roles by recording the voices and histories of nine Native American women leaders. It focuses on the experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of the women interviewed, giving a voice to nine of today's Native American female leaders, nine Ogimah Ikwe (leader women). Centuries of silence surround Native American women's leadership roles following European contact. 5 The best information on what it was like to be a Native American woman in early America would have [End Page 57] been from Native American women themselves, but few were asked. Considering the history of violence and oppression waged against Indian people by non-Indians, Native American women may not have trusted outsiders with the knowledge of their ceremonies, thoughts, or feelings. 6 Rayna Green states, "Our picture of how Native women really lived and functioned from the cradle to the grave, especially in a modern context, lacks clarity and realism." She poses the question, "Where is the serious study of [Native] women as culture brokers, working to create, manage, and minimize the negative effects of change on their people, working for Native people and with non-Indian women and men?" 7 Teresa LaFromboise, Anneliese Heyle, and Emily Ozer find that "there is a dearth of empirical research focused on American Indian women and written from an Indian cultural perspective." 8 Mihesuah tells us, "Aspects that have gone mostly unaddressed in historical works are the feelings and emotions of Indian women. . . . If writers want to find out what Indian women think, they should ask Indian women." 9 Changes that have taken place within Native societies to redefine gender roles need to be recorded: "Silence surrounds the lives of Native North American women. . . . We never hear their voices and are never told their tales." 10 This study addresses some of the issues of Native American women leaders in an emic manner, asking them about what they think and feel about their paths to leadership, adding to a steadily growing body of literature on today's Native American female leaders. A History of Native Women's Roles Native American women's roles were more powerful, important, and related to leadership than European men would have expected or understood, and their roles were as diverse as the tribes of North America. 11 There was no universal standard regarding the status of Native American women; the role of each woman was unique to her own tribe. In general, prior to settler colonialism, women's power and status were based on their relative control over land, horticultural production, and nomination of chiefs, as well as on their participation in village and tribal decision making. 12 Women's political power was the ability to influence who held office, not the more direct ability to hold office. 13 Through the decades since earliest contact, policies and laws directed at Native Americans have changed the manner in which centuries-old tribal leadership was practiced and maintained. There can be no question that, at the time of colonization, most tribes were egalitarian societies with complex clan systems. Women elders chose tribal leaders and had a voice in decisions important to the tribe's livelihood...

Lysistratus, Lysistrata, Lysistratum

Instances of women's involvement in politics are prevalent both in the historical and cross-cultural literature. However, as we know, the involvement of some women in political life has not always produced greater access to political power for women in everyday life. This article aims to examine how the identities of mother and activist have been produced and brought together, or coconstructed, in published texts and in interviews conducted with women activists. The analysis aims to illustrate the usefulness of looking at contexts and relationships for empirical work in this area. In doing so the article unpacks the concepts of “mother,” “woman,” “politics,” and “activist” to argue that we can reach a more useful understanding of identity if we address these not as stable and pre-existing, but rather as shifting and multiply-determined, products.

Democracy and the rise of women's movements in sub-Saharan Africa

Despite a late and fitful start, democracy in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe has recently shown promising growth. Kathleen M. Fallon discusses the role of women and women's advocacy groups in furthering the democratic transformation of formerly autocratic states. Using Ghana as a case study, Fallon examines the specific processes women are using to bring about political change. She assesses information gathered from interviews and surveys conducted in Ghana and assays the existing literature to provide a focused look at how women have become involved in the democratization of sub-Saharan nations. The narrative traces the history of democratic institutions in the region-from the imposition of male-dominated mechanisms by western states to latter-day reforms that reflect the active resurgence of women's political power within many African cultures-to show how women have made significant recent political gains in Ghana and other emerging democracies. Fallon attributes these advances to a combination of forces, including the decline of the authoritarian state and its attendant state-run women's organizations, newly formed constitutions, and newfound access to good-governance funding. She draws the study into the larger debate over gendered networks and democratic reform by exploring how gender roles affect and are affected by the state in Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. In demonstrating how women's activism is evolving with and shaping democratization across the region, Democracy and the Rise of Women's Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa reveals how women's social movements are challenging the barriers created by colonization and dictatorships in Africa and beyond.

Women's Political Representation and Welfare State Spending in 12 Capitalist Democracies

One of the sharpest criticisms of welfare state research is insufficient attention to factors relating to gender relations and inequalities. Recent scholarship has begun to address welfare state effects on gender-related outcomes, but the evaluation of theories of welfare development with respect to gender factors is somewhat less developed, leaving open a number of important questions regarding gender as a mechanism behind welfare state development. Using established theoretical perspectives as a baseline model, this study evaluates the effects of women's political power on welfare state effort within 12 capitalist democracies. Cross-sectional time-series analyses of OECD data provide evidence for the impact of women's political representation on levels of social expenditure. Further, women's political representation mediates a portion of the effects of women in the labor force. We discuss implications for extending welfare state theory and for refining the role of gender-related mechanisms in welfare state development.

Mulheres indigenas: poder e tradição

This study contemplates reports and reflections about gender and the interfaces with work, power and woman's political participation within the Bororo indigenous communities in Mato Grosso, Guarani/Kaiowa a nd Kadiweu on es, in Mato Grosso do Sul. In the study with the Bororo community, the woman valorization occurred because she represents the guardian of the culture and of the traditional knowledge, and at the same time, she is an important speaker for the Bororo and the non indigenous s ociety. In the ca se of Guarani/Kaiowa c ommunity, the most i mportant facts are, on on e side, the departure of the men and their wish to become city men, and on the other, the women who wish or need to keep the Guarani identity and live in the reserve. In the Kadiweu community, the most important fact is the women political power and a role division between men and women, without the attribution of more value to one role or the other.

Response to Lois Helmbold, ?Women's Studies in Sin City: Reactionary Politics and Feminist Possibilities?

In the last issue of the NWSA Journal (Summer 2005), Lois Helmbold offered an account of her experiences as chair of the Studies Department at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) in, Women's Studies in Sin City: Reactionary Politics and Feminist Possibilities. Three years as the head of the department have given Helmbold a point of view that is different from our own as members of the wider Studies community at UNLV. We have a close community of feminist scholars, and we offer here another perspective on our location at UNLV. Helmbold's essay begins with a picture of students who have been showgirls, curators at the Liberace Museum, married seven times; who love classes like Porn in the U.S.A., go to basketball games where 4-yearolds perform heteronormative sexuality, and are naive about race, class, or gender (Helmbold 2005, 171). As feminists, both newcomers and old timers living and working in Las Vegas, we have found that over-simplified views of Las Vegas as a retrograde, sexist city, miss the counterintuitive ways in which many women have greater access to power here than they might elsewhere. Instead of dismissing or criticizing students with unique Las Vegas life experiences as naive, we should listen to students for what they can teach us about twenty-first-century feminism. The picture of women's power in Las Vegas is more complicated than stereotypes suggest. Las Vegas's political economy is distinctive because it is generally built on women's labor, and to a large extent, women's sexualized labor. However, it has one of the most highly unionized service industries in the nation, and these relatively high-paying service jobs make it possible for many women here to earn livable wages. Furthermore, women's political power in Las Vegas, and in Nevada, is greater than in most of the nation (Nevada currently ranks ninth in the nation for women holding elected office) partly because of women's contributions to the historical development of the state. UNLV has had a female president for the past 12 years, and the university has, with a few exceptions that Helmbold's article highlights, encouraged the growth of Studies, first as a program, and now as a department. Unlike Helmbold's experience, it has been our experience that UNLV has provided longstanding institutional support for Studies. We believe this is precisely because of the contradictory nature of women's power here. The labor market and

A study in social change

Taiwan has dramatically improved its response to domestic violence within the last fifteen years, becoming the first East Asian country to pass major legislation criminalizing domestic violence. Ethnographic research on the origins, development, and operations of the domestic violence prevention movement shows how individuals from diverse backgrounds acted collectively to achieve this social reversal. Activists have profited from feminist social networks, the growing economic and political power of women, domestic violence models from other countries, a unified vision of creating new legislation, and an atmosphere open to change. Their efforts were catalyzed by three widely publicized cases regarding violence against women and culminated in the passage of the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act in 1998. The domestic violence prevention movement in Taiwan provides a valuable case study of social change and a model for other East Asian countries interested in passing similar legislation.

The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere (review)

Reviewed by: The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere Caroline Levander The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalism and the Literary Public Sphere. By Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. 336 pp. $49.50. In this highly intelligent and elegantly written book, Elizabeth Maddox Dillon makes the important observation that U.S. liberalism depends upon the concept of gender for its successful functioning and, more particularly, that women's private status has been integral to liberalism since its inception. As Dillon goes on to make clear, such an observation is of immediate importance to those interested in American literary and political cultures, as well as to those working in political theory and feminist studies. Feminist critics, for example, have tended to argue that "liberalism is flawed insofar as it excludes women," but Dillon shows that "while it is indeed the case that the figure of the woman within liberalism often stands opposed to the autonomous, white male liberal subject," "this opposition is itself crucial to liberal thought and culture" (3). Such a shift in thinking about gender and liberalism simultaneously locates women firmly within the broad conceptual history of liberalism and reveals liberalism's deep dependence on those female citizens it seems to exclude. Further, such an analysis reorganizes familiar histories of liberalist theory, as Dillon demonstrates when she explains how early liberalist rhetoric was at work in both Ann Hutchinson's trial and Winthrop's strategic representations of it to an English public upon whom the Massachusetts Bay Colony depended for resources. After an adeptly argued introductory chapter on gender, liberal theory, and the literary public sphere, Dillon moves to a consideration of how the antinomian controversy, which has long been seen as repressing women, actually involved an intricate and extended negotiation of women's political power. Showing that the antinomian controversy marks the beginning of an institutionalization of liberalism, rather than its repression, Dillon persuasively locates U.S. liberalism's origins much earlier in the nation's history than is usually assumed. Such a rehistoricizing of liberalism—one that shows the centrality of women's assumption of prominence to the evolution of a liberal public sphere—is followed by a chapter on the importance of marriage to a developing U.S. political culture. Showing a correlation between marriage's development into an increasingly intensive relation between individuals and political culture's increasing decentralization, Dillon makes the important observation that marriage shores up liberalist structures by emphasizing heterosexual desire and thus emphasizing sexual difference. As she argues, consensual marriage's primary condition "seems to be the cultivation of desire for a partner defined in sex specific terms: one need not only find a partner of the opposite sex, but it is precisely their sex—their manliness or womanliness—that one must find desirable" (129). It is sentences like this that make The Gender of Freedom a pleasure to read. In her fourth and final chapter on sentiment and sociality, Dillon explores four infanticide narratives that precede and, she argues, help to produce nineteenth-century sentimental novelists' primary concern with the mother-child bond. Moving from marriage to motherhood, this chapter argues that the repeated trope of the [End Page 208] dead child in sentimental fiction works to "produce the freedom of the liberal subject through [the] affective abundance" created by the child's death (203). While it is certainly true that child death is a prominent theme in sentimental fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), the fact that maternal death and orphanage seem equally important elements of other popular novels raises an important and unexplored question about female mortality's impact on liberalism. Similarly, the interest of this chapter in infanticide narratives brings to mind the many slave narratives that depict a slave mother's desire to kill her offspring as an act of maternal nurture, and one wonders, finally, about the place of racial identity within the model of gender and liberalism that Dillon generates. It is, no doubt, the case that women engaged with the gendered dynamics of a developing liberalist ideal in distinct ways, based on other constituting elements of their social identities. Yet a brief consideration of...

THE LIMITS OF STATE SUFFRAGE FOR CALIFORNIA WOMEN CANDIDATES IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA

California women gained the right to run for the state legislature and Congress when they won the vote in 1911. Coming nine years before the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised women nationally in 1920, this era of state enfranchisement appeared ripe for women's electoral success. The ongoing national suffrage movement, the California Progressive Party, and the extensive network of California women's clubs could all have worked to advance women's candidacies. Instead, these factors created conditions that undermined women's political ambitions. Not until 1918, when passage of a national suffrage amendment seemed imminent and the power of the Progressive Party in California faded, did women �nd success as candidates. Their delayed victories reveal the limits of state enfranchisement for women's political power.