What happened? In Canada, according to Kome, the important points about 1984 are that the National Action Committee (NAC) sponsored a leaders' debate which forced all three parties to focus on the women's-issue concerns of women voters, and that more females than ever before were elected to the House of Commons. Clearly, both are important achievements, but once again the account leaves open some very interesting questions. For example, did a well documented gender gap in Canadian political attitudes exist and, if so, what happened to it in 1984? Was the election of so many new female MPs a tribute to the impact of Canadian feminism? What lessons might be drawn from the NAC leaders' debate?

Before focusing on these particular issues, it is useful to review briefly Kome's handling of contemporary feminism and the women's movement. Unlike many European sources, Canadian studies of women since the late 1960s -- including Women of Influence -- tend to neglect a very meaningful. distinction between older women's rights activists and established feminist organizations (such as the Canadian Federation of University Women, the Business and Professional Women's Clubs, the National Council of Women of Canada, and the YWCA), on the one hand, and younger, more radical women's movement activists and groups, on the other. The latter, which grew primarily out of student and anti-war organizations of the Canadian new left, could be termed the women's movement, in contrast to the former stream of women's rights or feminism.

Although these distinctions may seem inconsequential and indeed artificial from the perspective of 1985, they are crucial to any analysis of women's political history in Canada. That is, without the uneasy merger which eventually linked a politically moderate social feminist tradition with a far less conventional radical, socialist, and Marxist women's movement coming out of the new left, the "advances" which Kome refers to in the period since 1970 would probably not have occurred.

In light of the historical importance of this women's movement, it is disconcerting to find that "radical feminists" suddenly leap into Kome's discussion on page 93, at the 1972 founding conference of NAC, when "the militants kept grabbing the microphones and shouting down the speakers." Who were these disruptive people? Where did they come from? What did they believe in? And who let them into the conference? The point here is not comic relief, but rather a troubling sense that Women of Influence is again telling only one part, and perhaps the less important part, of the story of women in the Canadian political process.

This problem brings us back to our earlier concerns regarding the 1984 elections, and specifically to the issue of a gender gap in political attitudes. The view that women's beliefs differ substantially from those of men has existed for most of this century although, unlike the gender gap position endorsed by Kome, conventional arguments maintain that moralism, traditionalism and, above all, conservatism distinguish female attitudes. One of the direct effects of the women's movement on the discipline of political science has been precisely in this area of public opinion research, where feminist scholars have identified a lack of empirical rigor in older assertions regarding female conservatism. Except in European Catholic cultures, where confessional parties of the right and centre-right have benefited disproportionately from women's electoral support, there exists little systematic evidence of the conventional wisdom; in fact, careful reanalysis of older Canadian data shows that women in some regions and in some generational categories were more politically reformist than comparable men.

American gender gap arguments follow quite neatly from this critique of established assumptions. They posit that women's attitudinal support for peace, the environment, and social welfare spending, combined with a tendency for younger, educated, and employed female votes (the so-called feminist vote) to strongly endorse Democratic candidates McGovern and Carter, constitute a liberal or radical -- as opposed to conservative -- gender gap phenomenon that promises to change the face of American politics.