Two Union College professors led a panel discussion on “Feminism and Ambition: Obstacles to Women's Achievement,” as part of a special visit Thursday by C-SPAN2's Book TV bus tour.
More than two dozen people participated in the event, which was held in the Sadock Women's and Gender Studies Center, Room 301, Reamer Campus Center.
Political science professors Richard L. Fox and Lori Jo Marso discussed their recent books on the topic and took questions from the audience.
Fox is the author of “It Takes a Candidate: Why Women Don't Run for Office,'' (Cambridge University Press), co-authored by Jennifer L. Lawless, a Union alum and professor at Brown University who is also seeking a Congressional seat in Rhode Island. The book uses a national survey of 3,800 “potential candidates” to conclude that despite a number of high-profile women in office, including Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, there remains a wide gender gap in political ambition.
The authors demonstrate that women's attitudes about seeking political office are not determined by strategic opportunities, but instead by other factors, including early socialization and the role of family members. The result is that women are less likely than men to run for office, to be recruited to run for office and think they are even qualified to run for office.
Marso is the author of the just-published “Feminist Thinkers and the Demands of Femininity: The Lives and Work of Intellectual Women,” (Routledge). Her book examines the lives and works of historical and contemporary feminists, including Simone de Beauvoir and Ana Castillo, and how these thinkers have strived to balance politics, intellectual work and the material conditions of femininity.
Marso, who also directs the Women's and Gender Studies program at Union, argues that the theories of these feminists should not be divorced from the struggles and contradictions of their actual lives. The book also analyzes the memoirs of contemporary feminist thinkers to show that feminists struggle with the same difficulties today that were encountered by the women who came before.
Thursday's discussion coincided with an appearance by C-SPAN2's Book TV Bus, which was parked outside the Reamer Campus Center. Visitors were allowed to tour the studio inside the 45-foot long bus, participate in an interactive demonstration about Book TV programming and learn how a television show is produced.
Book TV features non-fiction programming each weekend, including author interviews, readings and coverage of panels at bookstores, libraries and college campuses across the country.
Book TV is carried by Time Warner Cable on Channel 52.