Framing Women Politicians in Old Democracies

This chapter looks at the changing ways in which women politicians have been framed over time. The dominant attitude at the time when women got the vote was that women's proper role was in the family and not in politics (maternal discourse). A more recent discourse, 'no democracy without parity', refers to a democratic deficit if women or minorities are not fully included in the political institutions. The most commonly used arguments for more women in politics were that women would bring specific knowledge and priorities to politics, that as equal citizens women should have equal rights to participate in the decision-making and that women would change the way politics was done. The most recent discourse is that women are needed in politics to clean up the mess caused by men.