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American women attain more professional success than most of their counterparts around the world, but they lag surprisingly far behind in the national political arena. Women held only 15 percent of U.S. congressional seats in 2006, a proportion that ranks America behind eighty-two other countries in terms of females elected to legislative office. A compelling exploration of this deficiency, The Motherless State reveals why the United States differs from comparable democracies that routinely elect far more women to their national governing bodies and chief executive positions.Explaining that eq

An examination of the implications of basing abortion rights on a right to privacy, suggesting that a focus on the legal grounds for a woman's right to consent to be pregnant would be a better basis for the right to choice. This switch in strategy would place the burden of proof on those who would then have to show why the fetus has a right to access a woman's body. It is concluded that the issue in abortion is the woman's right to consent to the physical intrusion of the fertilized ovum initiating & maintaining a condition of pregnancy in her body. This approach will establish the strongest legal grounds for exercising the right to abortion & aid in the pursuit of state funding for abortion. 77 References. D. Schwartz

An enduring contribution of the new institutionalism is its affirmation of the significance of the Progressive era. As a result, we have learned not only how the "big bang" explosion of welfare legislation in the New Deal rests upon structures and precedents set in the early twentieth-century decades, but also how this early reform period continues to influence contemporary policies and politics. Alan Dawley, Bruce Ackerman, and Morton Keller, for example, point to an activist state established in the Progressive era to check a laissez-faire governing system as the foundation of subsequent New Deal accomplishments upon which reformers built "where progressives had left off." Theda Skocpol adds a cross-national perspective, showing how the American welfare state instituted in the early twentieth century evidenced a distinctive "maternalist" dynamic oriented toward addressing women's economic needs, in contrast to "paternalistic" norms in Western European nations assisting male workers.

Examines pregnancy & consent within the abortion debate in the context of good samaritan arguments initiated by Judith Jarvis Thomson (1986). Drawing on legal & medical definitions, the abortion issue is reframed as the right of a woman to consent to what will be done to her body by the fetus. This argument shifts abortion rights from decisional autonomy to bodily integrity affirmed by samaritan case law. Recasting abortion as a response to nonconsensual pregnancy opens new grounds guaranteeing women's reproductive rights. 22 References. Adapted from the source document.