In this absorbing story of how child abuse grew from a small, private-sector charity concern into a multimillion-dollar social welfare issue, Barbara Nelson provides important new perspectives on the process of public agenda setting. Using extensive personal interviews and detailed archival research, she reconstructs an invaluable history of child abuse policy in America. She shows how the mass media presented child abuse to the public, how government agencies acted and interacted, and how state and national legislatures were spurred to strong action on this issue. Nelson examines prevailing...

To what extent do women participate in the decisions that shape the political and economic contours of the world? In what ways do women in different countries have different political goals? How should women mobilize for change?
This important book--the first to analyze the complexities of women's political participation on a cross-national scale and from a feminist perspective--surveys forty-three countries, chosen to represent a variety of political systems, levels of economic development, and regions, in order to answer these questions. The research definitively demonstrates that in no...