This book explores the idea that table activities--the mealtime rituals of food preparation, serving, and dining--lay the foundation for a proper education on the value of civility, the importance of the common good, and what it means to be a good citizen. The arts of conversation and diplomatic speech are learned and practiced at tables, and a political history of food practices recasts thoughtfulness and generosity as virtues that enhance civil society and democracy. In our industrialized and profit-centered culture, however, foodwork is devalued and civility is eroding.

Looking at the field of American civility, Janet A. Flammang addresses the gendered responsibilities for foodwork's civilizing functions and argues that any formulation of "civil society" must consider food practices and the household. To allow space for practicing civility, generosity, and thoughtfulness through everyday foodwork, Americans must challenge the norms of unbridled consumerism, work-life balance, and domesticity and caregiving. Connecting political theory with the quotidian activities of the dinner table, Flammang discusses practical ideas from the "delicious revolution" and Slow Food movement to illustrate how civic activities are linked to foodwork, and she points to farmers' markets and gardens in communities, schools, and jails as sites for strengthening civil society and degendering foodwork.

Since the 1960s, academic and activist women have been challenging the conventional wisdom about political life and the study of politics. Organizing her book by standard political concepts -- the mobilization and participation of the mass public; the recruitment, policy preferences, and political style of public officials; agenda-setting; and coalition-building -- Janet Flammang subjects these concepts to a withering feminist critique based on the insights of feminist theory and the empirical evidence of hundred of studies of women's distinctive politics.

This book accomplishes four major tasks:
*It provides a comprehensive critical history of the changing research on politics and the changing nature  of the political science discipline.
*It analyzes the course of women's political activism in the United States.
*It develops a rich case study of women's politics in Northern California's Silicon Valley, an area once nicknamed "the feminist capital of the nation."
*It examines coalitions and divisions within the women's movement with sensitivity to minority politics, as in the chapter subtitled, "The Hard Work of Sisterhood."

Women's Political Voice record the transformative  politics of the women's movement and, simultaneously, urges political scientists to ask new questions and to adopt new methods.