Content area
Full Text
Gender Power, Leadership, and Governance. Georgia Duerst-Lahti and Rita Mae Kelly, eds. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995. 305 pp. $47.50, cloth; $17.95, paper.
In the introduction to their edited volume, Duerst-Lahti and Kelly write that students of any or any combination of the subjects included in the title-gender, power, leadership, or governance-will find the book of interest, and I agree with them. Each chapter considers how men and masculinity and women and femininity pertain to gender power in public leadership. Gender power is defined as power that results from our gendered evaluations of things and behaviors and our ways of being, behaving, and structuring social relations. It is rooted in social constructions that give meaning to how we interpret and understand sex differences as being important in the establishment of social order.
The book has three main objectives: (1 ) to develop the concept of gender power as crucial to the understanding of governance and leadership; (2) to build on prior empirical research on sex and sex roles and develop new theory; and (3) to demonstrate tangible ways to apply the concept of gender power to the leadership and governance domains. The contributors generally take a political science perspective but are also broadly schooled in general social science backgrounds. The editors do an excellent job of stating basic assumptions that underlie the book's framework and defining central basic concepts in the introduction, an approach that was very helpful in understanding the volume's theoretical grounding. For example, the authors state that they wish to demonstrate how gender is socially constructed and different from one's biological sex, includes both men and women, and emanates from normative sets of belief and behavior patterns. They assume that masculinism is viewed as the norm for appropriate leadership and governance behavior in the U.S., and feminism and femaleness and ways of being are considered deviant from this norm. Clear definitions are provided for terms such as sex, sex roles, gender, gender cross-over, gender power, and transgendered. For a tighter orientation of the book, however, it would have been useful if the editors had given an overview of the specific content of each chapter in the introduction rather than at the end of chapter 2.
The book is divided...