Political Scientist Named Mather Professor
 Karen Beckwith, a leading figure in the academic study of women and politics, has joined the College’s political science department as its first Flora Stone Mather Professor.
Formerly a faculty member at the College of Wooster, Beckwith is the author of American Women and Political Participation: The Impacts of Work, Generation, and Feminism, and coeditor of Women’s Movements Facing the Reconfigured State. She is also a founding editor of Politics & Gender, a journal of the American Political Science Association. Her next book, Women, Politics and Governance in Western Europe, will be published in March 2007.
Joseph White, chair of political science, says that Beckwith “has played a major role in defining the field of comparative gender politics.” After her early work on American women’s political participation, she extended her range to examine the recruitment of women legislators in Western Europe and their role in political parties. In the process, she developed concepts and methods that have guided subsequent research.
In the early 1990s, having become interested in women and the labor movement, Beckwith studied coal industry disputes in the United States and England, looking at how union tactics were influenced by female coal miners and how women in miners’ families became involved in political protests. Most recently, she has explored how larger changes in European politics and governance have affected women’s movements—and vice versa.
“A focus on gender not only permits political scientists a deeper and richer understanding of how politics works,” Beckwith says. “It also helps to reveal the extent to which apparently gender-neutral state institutions structure political disadvantage for women. My work is primarily concerned with women in political movements, and in investigating how activist women succeed in securing their goals, as well as how they have been able to transform—literally, re-gender—state institutions.”
The Flora Stone Mather Alumnae Association endowed the professorship in 1973. Since then, more than 30 visiting scholars, representing the full range of arts and sciences disciplines, have received one-year appointments to teach and pursue their research at Case. Now, for the first time, the Flora Stone Mather Professor will be a tenured member of the College’s faculty.
“We are thrilled to have a scholar of such wide interests, and with such deep respect within the profession, joining our faculty,” White says. “We see Professor Beckwith as a great mentor, especially to our junior faculty; she is known as an institution-builder and a very fine colleague. And she is someone with a really strong background in the kind of teaching we like to do. We just think that we are very fortunate.”
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