According to President George W. Bush, a nation's commitment to liberty and democracy should be gauged by its willingness to extend rights and political recognition to women. As the world's first modern democracy, one might expect that the United States has led the way in granting equal rights to women. Furthermore, champions of political liberalism contend that our government's commitment to legal, individual rights and nondiscrimination has created equal opportunity for all, regardless of race or sex. Yet an examination of American political history reveals the persistence of gender hierarchy in U.S. politics, a stubborn resistance to the idea that gender should not matter to one's political standing, and, at best, an incomplete realization of the liberal ideal of equal rights for all. From a comparative perspective today, the United States is far behind other Western democracies in extending social rights that particularly benefit women and in the proportion of women who hold office in the national government. This has led some scholars to consider whether gender inequality is a deep-seated feature of the American political system and whether liberal political structures will ever provide for equal rights and recognition for women. Scholarship on gender and American political development can move us closer to an analytic framework that clarifies the paradoxical place that women hold in the American system.