The Victoria Schuck Award is given annually for the best book published on women and politics. The recipient isLisa Baldez, Dartmouth College for Defying Convention: U.S. Resistance to the U.N. Treaty on Women’s Rights, Cambridge University Press.
In Defying Convention, Baldez addresses important and regretfully neglected puzzles regarding the failure of the US to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW). In doing so, Baldez provides an extremely valuable, well-researched examination of what is at stake in the ratification of CEDAW, how CEDAW and its impact have evolved over time (and why), and the consequences of US non-ratification for women in the US and around the world. Defying Convention is a well-grounded transnational feminist study, one that carefully avoids using the US or Western frames to critique non-Western nations. In this respect, it exemplifies the best of transnational feminist political analysis. Indeed, Defying Convention is a sub-field and discipline boundary crossing work that should be of interest to students not only of international relations, but also of American politics, legal theory, comparative politics, and women’s and gender studies.
Thanks to the Award Committee: Christina Wolbrecht, University of Notre Dame, chair; Nikol Alexander Floyd, Rutgers University; and Beth Reingold, Emory University.