Carissa Tudor is a postdoctoral fellow in International & Public Affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University. She will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam, starting in the fall of 2023. Her research interests span historical and comparative political economy and gender and political development with a regional focus in Europe. She studies how long-term institutional and economic changes, such as state-building, democratization, and economic development, shape and are shaped by gender relations, family structures, and women’s rights. 

In her talk Carissa notes we are often told that women were first able to participate in politics and meaningfully engage in economics in the 1900s, facing complete public exclusion before then. While this context was far from a paragon of gender (or any other kind of) egalitarianism, political rights reflected the complex ways in which nuanced hierarchies structured social relations. Counterintuitively, it was democratization that led to women’s political exclusion. Democratization facilitated women’s exclusion in two ways. It weakened the ties between economic activities and political rights, and it institutionalized simplistic ideas over complex lived realities. This work forces us to rethink political development and gender, perhaps making recent regressions in women’s rights less surprising, if no less distressing.

Location: Kravis 321