Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women’s Representation in Congress. By Catherine N. Wineinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. $99.00 (cloth), $27.95 (paper). https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197556542.001.0001.

Abstract

The year 2022 has brought a series of political surprises, and thankfully it has also brought us Catherine N. Wineinger’s Gendering the GOP: Intraparty Politics and Republican Women’s Representation in Congress to help us understand the world better. The particular world thatWineinger describes and analyzes is Republican women in Congress, and she does so brilliantly. Her central questions build on, and go beyond, foundational themes of the women and politics subfield. Gender gaps in ambition or participation and the legislative impact that women make are part of her story, but the main question brings us into the realm of partisan-gender intersectionality. AsWineinger puts it, the book “examine[s] the evolution of gender dynamics within the House GOP and how women navigate those dynamics,” allowing her to “unveil the process through which women’s representation occurs in a polarized congressional environment” (2; italics in original). Increasing and asymmetric party polarization has had a differential impact on Republican women, who are overall less conservative than their male counterparts; the hard-right tilt of the party in recent years has therefore put GOP women in, scientifically speaking, a real pickle. Those who resist the extremist policies and cult of charisma in the party suffer the fate of Liz Cheney (effective expulsion through internal processes like party primaries), but it is increasingly difficult to claim to represent “women’s perspective” or “women’s issues” in a party so anti-feminist. Republican women House members, Wineinger tells us, are carving out new ways to represent women, not (as before) with a focus on policy issues but in “using their gendered perspectives to advance conservative issues that align with their party’s communication tactics” (3). This has involved key changes in both rhetoric and practice for these women, necessitating the construction of a “partisan-gender identity,” with the order of