https://doi.org/10.31261/rias.22279
The Art of Power is an autobiographical account by Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as Speaker of the US House of Representatives. The book traces her political trajectory from early campaign work to her tenure as Speaker, situating her legislative career within broader debates about leadership, governance, and gender in American politics. Pelosi reflects on her political philosophy, legislative experiences, and self-conception as a woman operating within a historically male-dominated institution, emphasizing how she understands her approach to power as distinct from that of many of her male colleagues. This review offers a critical assessment of the gender dynamics and partisan conflicts that shape the narrative, while also engaging with the book’s achievements and limitations. In particular, it examines patterns of selective self-representation, strategic framing of political conflict, and the relative absence of sustained self-critique. Despite its strongly performative and self-affirming tone, The Art of Power can be read as a valuable ethnographic document of political authority and feminist leadership within contemporary American legislative structures, offering insight into the exercise of power in an increasingly polarized democratic system.
Download files
Citation rules
Cited by / Share
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Copyright Holder of the submitted text is the Author. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the RIAS websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative CommonsAttribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Any commercial use requires separate written agreement with the Author and a proper credit line indicating the source of the original publication in RIAS.
The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY 4.0 license.
The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.
If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution - By the same conditions 4.0 International".
ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).
Under the Creative Commons Attribution license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.
Submitting a text to RIAS, the Author automatically declares that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, he or she agrees to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, in connection with the submission.
Vol. 19 No. 1 (2026)
Published: 2026-06-30
10.31261/RIAS
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
English