Women’s political participation through feminist lenses: ac omparative study of capitalist, socialist, and post-communist systems

Women's political participation can be viewed as a topic within an interdisciplinary field, primarily at the intersection of political science and gender studies. In western capitalist states, women's political empowerment has evolved through three waves of feminist movements; in socialist states, women's political participation was constitutionally enshrined at the founding of the state; in post-communist states, which have undergone the collapse of communist regimes, the transformation of women's political participation is even more complex. Suppose the person who is determined to study women's political participation is driven by a fundamental aspiration, namely, achieving gender equality in politics. In that case, an examination of feminist thought is crucial. It is a fact that gender equality in politics is difficult to quantify; perhaps one might propose implementing 50% male and 50% female representation in parliaments or equivalent political institutions; yet, it is still a matter of formality, even though such a formality has hardly been achieved in any country today. Politics itself is an all-encompassing field. As Hanisch (1970) argued, the personal is political (p.1). Discussions on politics could extend to fundamental philosophical questions, such as the individual and the collective, the individual and the state, and law and justice. When discussions on politics intersect with gender issues, critiques by feminists inevitably arise. Regardless of feminist schools of thought, those critiques involve a reconsideration of the individual, society, and the state from a gendered perspective. Along this line, we may seek out our answers to what, how and why women's political participation is. As Young (1980) have criticized, certain feminist critiques of patriarchy as static or overly deterministic (p. 172), this paper argues instead that patriarchy can be seen as a dynamic historical process, and explores women's political participation based on concrete social realities, namely, the different states with specific regimes defined by class issues (Eisenstein, 1979, p. 45): capitalist, socialist, and post-communist states. This thesis presents two main arguments regarding the study of women's political participation. First, it recognizes the significance of combining political and feminist analysis, arguing that only intersectional analysis can truly capture the complexity of women's participation in politics. Second, this thesis naturally contends such a premise, namely, the political regime defined by class decisively impacts the nature and features of women's political participation.