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 theories about agenda setting and introduces a new conceptual framework for understanding how a social issue becomes part of the public agenda. This issue of child abuse, she argues, clearly reveals the scope and limitations of social change initiated through interest-group politics. Unfortunately, the process that transforms an issue into a popular cause, Nelson concludes, brings about programs that ultimately address only the symptoms and not the roots of such social problems.

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 country do women have political status, access, or influence equal to men's. The book begins by offering an expanded definition of political engagement; by elaborating on the patterns that emerge from the study; and by describing the methodology and data collection. The rest of the chapters focus on individual countries and follow a set format: they describe the political history and institutions in the country, summarize the organization of women's movements there, and analyze how groups of women articulate political demands and what responses they receive from their government or community. While the contexts of activism vary widely, the authors find that the issues that engage women politically are often similar across the globe: these include resistance to militarism, the desire to become equal partners in new democracies, and frustration about their lack of representation in programs for economic development.