Party Women's Organizations: Ladies Auxillaries or Sites of Substantive Representation?

Party women’s organizations may be on the wane; and they may historically have been more about what women can do for the party rather than what the party can do for women. But in some cases they look to have played key roles in feminizing party politics. This roundtable contribution looks to identify what makes a party’s women organization a good site of women’s substantive representation.  According to extant frameworks, a feminist political party is one that is responsive to feminization claims on both dimensions: the inclusion of women within the party, and the inclusion of women’s concerns. Consequently, a party women’s organizations would need to be fully integrated into the party proper, rather than constituting a ‘ladies auxillary’. In analysing party women’s organizations this contribution draws explicitly on feminist readings of the intra-party democracy (IPD) and party regulation literatures. The former asks, to what extent do party women’s organizations sit uneasily with more internally democratic parties, at least as traditionally understood? A feminist reading of IPD suggests a double shift of power within parties: from women to men, and between the party leadership and party members, and maintains a commitment to women as a group, not merely as individual members of a political party. The latter presents party regulation as one means by which to institutionalize women’s substantive representation. It begs the question of whether political parties should be regulated in ways the require them to establish, fully resource, and integrate party organizations ‘of’ and ‘for’ women?