Chapter 15: Viewing Women's Political Leadership Through a Rural Electoral Lens: Canada as a Case Study

Louise Carbert

Viewing women's political leadership through a rural electoral lens: Canada as a case study Urban–rural cleavages go to the heart of the distinctions between more and less women-friendly electoral districts in Canada's national and provincial legislatures (see, e.g., Moncrief &Thompson, 1991). Similar patterns have been reported in the United States (e.g., Palmer & Simon, 2008, p. 213). Much of the effort to understand these distinctions has concentrated on the positive impacts of various attributes of metropolitan settings—high levels of education, a thriving professional class, active women's interest groups, and so forth (Brodie, 1985; Matland & Studlar, 1998). Far less effort has been directed to understanding what it is about rural districts that hinders women's election to public office. Readers are typically left to frame it as an absence of those positive metropolitan attributes, leaving the impression that the tendency to exclude women is a relic of uninformed traditionalist attitudes. Some ...

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