9411142 Stetson This award supports the participation of eight U.S. social and political scientists (including two graduate students) in an international research planning workshop to be held in Western Europe in March, 1995. This activity was jointly organized by Professors Dorothy McBride Stetson of Florida Atlantic University, Amy Mazur of Washington State University, and Joyce Outshoorn of the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. The workshop will bring together U.S. and European scholars in political science and sociology for the purpose of establishing priorities for comparative research on institutionalized feminism and preparing research designs to conduct cross-national investigations of research questions and hypotheses. Invited participants in the workshop have expertise in comparative politics and social theory, and research experience on the phenomenon of women s policy institutions in one or more countries. The U.S. participants will benefit from the opportunity of working with counterparts from European countries where there is a long tradition of inquiry into state theories. Some of the most far-reaching changes in Western societies in the last 100 years have been related to the changes in gender roles, specifically those associated with the massive movement of women into the paid labor force and the parallel shifts in family relations, child rearing and political participation. The term state feminism refers to the creation of government agencies assigned to improve the status of women. These include a variety of forms from specialized bureaus or ministerial level offices to equal opportunity councils. The workshop and ensuing collaborative research promises to make important contributions to the development of empirically grounded theory of state capacities and state-society relations. ***
