2011 Victoria Schuck Award

The Victoria Schuck Award is given for the best book published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year on women and politics.

Award Committee: Kimberly J. Morgan, George Washington University; Vanita Seth, University of California, Santa Cruz; and Wendy Gunther-Canada, University of Alabama, Birmingham

Recipients: Torben Iversen, Harvard University, and Frances Rosenbluth, Yale University

Title: Women, Work & Politics: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale University Press)

Citation: In Women, Work & Politics: The Political Economy of Gender Inequality (Yale University Press 2010), Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth advance a sophisticated and provocative set of arguments the transformation of gender roles in both the private and public spheres. The authors bring together macro-level arguments about large-scale structural forces – such as rising rates of female work force participation – together with a micro-level bargaining model to help make sense of cross-national differences in phenomena such as the gender gap in voting, the prevalence of divorce, fertility rates, the representation of women in public office, and the division of household labor. Iversen and Rosenbluth thus tackle some of the biggest questions that have been debated by scholars of women and politics. In so doing, they develop an original perspective, one that applies insights from political economy and the varieties of capitalism to break new ground in longstanding scholarly debates. This is a timely and important study that is worthy of the Victoria Schuck Award