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.

“A fascinating history of the material changes in the ways women were represented in congressional proceedings; an ambitious reconsideration of the possibilities of a materialist rhetoric of desiring production; and a powerful analysis of the ways women were implicated in practices of jurisdiction, state building, and changing practices of governance. Any one of these is well worth the effort. Taken together, Who Should Govern Women? is an impressive and important contribution to feminism, rhetoric, and cultural studies.”—Lawrence Grossberg, Emeritus Distinguished Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“In this groundbreaking study, Keremidchieva centers the politics of gender within the formation and extension of the United States as a global economic empire, showing the interactions of feminism and congressional debate and providing a new and compelling understanding of US political history. Deftly analyzing specific, fascinating moments within wide-ranging theoretical frameworks, Who Should Govern Women? offers a welcome and bracing challenge to contemporary feminism, rhetoric, and geopolitics.”—Angela G. Ray, author of The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Zornitsa Dimova Keremidchieva is Associate Professor in the Communication Studies Department at the University of Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Quarterly Journal of Speech, Review of Communication, Women’s History Review, Feminist Media Studies, Women and Language, Argumentation and Advocacy, and Journal of Argumentation in Context, among others.

Communication Studies

           Rhetorical Studies

           Political

Gender Studies

History

           Nineteenth-century

           U.S.

Political Science

           American Politics

Rhetoric