As a reminder, this submission also includes my chapter 3 assignment due to corrupted file.

Chapter 13 is about gender, feminism, and politics. In it, Wade discusses the history of feminism in America, as well as current politics surrounding women, gender, and feminism. She begins with a discussion of the Women’s Suffrage Movement of the1800s and early 1900s. She writes about the struggle women had to gain the right to vote, along the way touching on this early feminist movement’s connection to the Civil Rights Movement. She details some of the tactics used to discredit the Suffrage Movement and the idea of women voting. Some of these include utilising racist fears (allowing women to vote would let twice as many black people vote) and drawing absurd comparisons ( eg allowing women to vote is comparable to letting housecats vote). Eventually, in 1920, American women were granted the right to vote. Since then, Women have been influencing American politics with their participation. Today, 18 percent of the United States Congress is comprised of women.This fact prompts wade to discuss two concepts: the governance of gender, and the gender of governance. The governance of gender refers to government policies that implicitly indicate how men and women should behave, by rewarding some and penalising others in ways that may at first seem gender-neutral. For example, Federal tax law is such that a family in which one partner earns $70,000/year and the other earns the same amount, pays more in taxes than a family in which one partner earns $140,000 and the other earns $0. This policy implicitly incentivises specialised, breadwinner/housewife families by lightening their tax burden as compared to dual-income families. The gender of governance refers to the fact that the majority of political leaders are male, and that gender affects what issues are ignored or given attention in government. Thus, by increasing women’s symbolic representation (electing women among our political leaders), their substantive representation also increases (female politicians are more likely than men to raise issues that impact the wellbeing of women). She ends the chapter with a discussion of  the corporate co-optation of feminism, or the use of feminist-sounding messages to further a profit-driven corporate agenda. Wade argues that this is part of the reason that many young people do not identify as ‘feminist’ and that feminists have, to some degree, lost control of what the label means.
The issue of symbolic and substantive representation is particularly salient from a modern, intersectional feminist perspective. Different groups of women have different needs and are not affected in the same ways by policies. For example, wealthy mothers are encouraged to specialise in childcare and housework because breadwinner/housewife families are incentivised through taxes. However, low-income mothers are encouraged to work for pay, because in order to receive government aid they must provide proof of employment. In this way, low-income women are symbolically represented in the same way as wealthier women are, but are not substantively represented in the same way. The issue of symbolic vs substantive representation comes into play in the film ‘North Country’ when the mine owner hires ‘the best woman lawyer I could find’ to oppose Josey, who sues the company to protect the rights of the female mine workers. In this way, he tries to symbolically appear as though he is representing the best interests of the women, while simultaneously trying to prevent their best interests from being protected. 
