Gertrude A. Steuernagel

Women Lawmakers, State Mandates and Women's Health

Abstract This research examines whether states with higher female representation in the legislature will be innovators in womens health policy. The issue of health policy was chosen due to increasing state legislative activity in health care, especially in response to citizen dissatisfaction with HMOs and PPOs. We use nine health policies to create an index of womens health mandates for the fifty states and Ordinary Least Squares Regression to test a number of explanations for policy adoptions. Previous research suggests women state legislators play an important role in placing policy issues of concern to women on the political agenda. Contrary to the literature and our expectations, female representation and leadership in state legislatures, the presence of a womens caucus, women chairs of health care committees, and the pace at which women have been elected to state legislatures over the past four decades were not related to policy adoptions. Similarly, the growth and size of the managed care industry did not explain the pattern of policy adoptions. What did seem to matter was the size of the medical establishment and Democratic party control. While womens interest groups may be critical in increasing awareness of the issues, findings of the empirical study suggest womens health policy is widely supported by both men and women state lawmakers. When the policies were disaggregated by type, the percentage of women in leadership positions was associated with the adoption of specific womens health policies with a univer-sal appeal, such as reconstructive breast surgery and extended maternity stays.

The Revitalization of Political Philosophy: Towards a Marcuse-Jung Synthesis

A growing number of political theorists are finding the study of psychology or psychoanalysis a rewarding key for an understanding of politics. Within the Marxian school of thought the apparent incompatibility of the presuppositions of Marx and Freud have been the source of serious theoretical problems and have eventually precipitated deep cleavages. Some theorists, in particular members of the Frankfurt school, have tried to reconcile the seeming contradictions. In the present essay Professor Steuernagel examines Herbert Marcuses effort to harmonize Marx and Freud and finds that his attempted synthesis is unconvincing. She shows that he could have been more successful if, instead of relying on Freud, he had relied on Jung, whom he dismisses out of hand. Through her analysis she contributes to the continual search for the aims of political philosophy and buttresses the case for the use of psychology in the study of political phenomena.