The Political Repression of Women

This paper, as its primary task, makes a case for a new conceptualization of political repression to take into account the experiences of women. The secondary task is to demonstrate that the new conception is operational. After establishing the characteristics of repression that are essentially the ill fate of women, the author coded reports from two sources into numerical data for fifty-seven country cases. Using this preliminary data on women's repression both in correlation and regression analyses, this research tests two counterpoised hypotheses, one claiming women's empowerment leads governments to choose repression and the other is that women's weakness allows repression. The results are promising but represent only a beginning. This study should encourage governments and human rights NGOs to collect more substantial reports on the repression of women.