The Politics of Gender extends Gal and Kligman's introduction to Reproducing Gender. Together, the two books provide much more than a consideration of gender issues in contemporary eastern and central Europe. The second book explores the politics of reproduction and abortion, the sociology of gender images, changing patterns of stratification, and male-female relations within the home before examining the role of women in politics. The contributors not only show what has and has not changed since the old order's collapse; they create another vantage point from which to judge the whole process of postsocialist political and economic transformation. Many of the essays in Reproducing Gender, particularly those by scholars from the region, are descriptively rich, offering a revealing sample of attitudes but with a somewhat rough-and-ready analytical infrastructure. Not so with Gal and Kligman's own work, which melds the project into an unusually sophisticated and subtle composite.
