Gender and authoritarian regimes:a review

Open Access

Abstract

Although the scientific community attests a "renaissance" (Bank 2009) of authoritarianism political science has no focus on the research field of gender and authoritarianism yet. The strengthening of authoritarianism research within political science is mostly located in comparative politics and regional studies. But most recent studies on authoritarian regimes do not focus on gender questions explicitly. This review gives a structured overview on recent literature on authoritarianism and gender and focusses on recent theoretical approaches to authoritarianism and authoritarian regimes. Furthermore interesting policies within a gender perspective and how they are looked upon in mainstream and feminist political science and in part recent historical research as well will be described: state formation and gender; political rights, suffrage rights and women's rights activism; women's representation; social hierarchies and social processes; family policy, the role of domestic violence and abortion rights as measuring degrees of women's autonomy and eventually the socio-economic gender orders.