Gender and Social Capital

Gender and Social Capital. Edited by Brenda O'Neill and Elisabeth O'Neill Gidengil. New York and London: Routledge. 2006. 425 pp. 29.95 paper.The essays in this volume constitute a feminist response to Robert Putnam's influential book Bowling Alone, and they shed light on two interrelated questions: First, how is our understanding of the nature and impact of social capital enriched by the introduction of a concern with the consequences of gender differences? Second, how is our understanding of the relationship of gender to politics deepened by an ongoing concern with social capital? As Virginia Sapiro put it (p. 152) in her exceptionally clear theoretical essay: “Wherever discussions of social capital and politics lead, our understanding of the phenomenon will be severely limited if scholars neglect the roles of gender in the creation and distribution of social capital and in the links between social capital and politics. Important aspects of the historically different cultural constructions of male and female in society and politics suggest that disregarding gender in understanding social capital is unwise. Given how different are the structures of women's and men's day-to-day lives and the different types and amounts of financial and social resources to which they have access, a ‘gender-neutral’ story of social capital and politics is likely to be a faulty story.”