Who Should Govern Women?

Who Should Govern Women? reconsiders feminism’s fraught relationship with parliamentary democracy by centering the US Congress as a crucial site where women’s political claims, their social experiences, and the gendered commitments of governance have long met, clashed, and reshaped one another. Informed by Gilles Deleuze’s new materialist philosophy of change, the book offers a new perspective on the political significance of congressional rhetoric. Drawing on more than a century of congressional debates, legislative records, and women’s advocacy—from the earliest assemblies, which sought to preserve strict gender boundaries, to the World War I era, when Congress began crafting policies explicitly focused on women—Zornitsa Dimova Keremidchieva shows how the interplay of gender, jurisdiction, and desire in congressional rhetoric helped assemble the changing institutional arrangements of the US political system and its global extensions. By linking feminism, legislative politics, and state formation, this book offers a new account of congressional rhetoric and the material legacies and potentialities of women’s appeals to the state. It will interest scholars and students of rhetoric, gender and feminist studies, political science, US history, and public policy, as well as readers seeking fresh perspectives on the legacies and futures of women, democracy, and empire.