Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India
Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India

Author: Mytheli Sreenivas

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-05-03

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 0295748850

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Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295748856 Beginning in the late nineteenth century, India played a pivotal role in global conversations about population and reproduction. In Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India, Mytheli Sreenivas demonstrates how colonial administrators, postcolonial development experts, nationalists, eugenicists, feminists, and family planners all aimed to reform reproduction to transform both individual bodies and the body politic. Across the political spectrum, people insisted that regulating reproduction was necessary and that limiting the population was essential to economic development. This book investigates the often devastating implications of this logic, which demonized some women’s reproduction as the cause of national and planetary catastrophe. To tell this story, Sreenivas explores debates about marriage, family, and contraception. She also demonstrates how concerns about reproduction surfaced within a range of political questions—about poverty and crises of subsistence, migration and claims of national sovereignty, normative heterosexuality and drives for economic development. Locating India at the center of transnational historical change, this book suggests that Indian developments produced the very grounds over which reproduction was called into question in the modern world. The open-access edition of Reproductive Politics and the Making of Modern India is freely available thanks to the TOME initiative and the generous support of The Ohio State University Libraries.

POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE AND WOMEN IN INDIA
POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHANGE AND WOMEN IN INDIA

Author: Dr. Mamta Chandrashekhar

Publisher: Anchor Academic Publishing

Published: 2016-03-08

Total Pages: 148

ISBN-13: 3960675151

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The role of women in India has changed significantly over the past few years. Globalization, urbanization, industrialization and privatization all played an important role in this development. After India became independent, several provisions for women were added to the Constitution of India, which is now one of the most rights-based constitutions in the world. Drafted around the same time as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights- UNO (1948), the Indian Constitution captures the essence of human rights in its Preamble, and elaborates these rights further in the sections on Fundamental Rights and on the Directive Principles of State Policy. The protection of women’s rights and the enhancement of their social and economic possibilities have become important political issues. Due to these socio- political changes, women have already gotten the opportunity to take important offices in India, including that of president, prime minister, speaker of the Lok Sabha and leader of the opposition. With the 73rd Constitutional Amendment Act from 1992 and the 74th Constitutional Amendment Act from 1993, women are furthermore empowered in local level government bodies. Apart from the political changes, women in India now also participate in all social activities and take part in sports, media, art and culture, science and technology. This book takes a look at every aspect of a woman’s life, such as education, marriage, family and health, in order to give a thorough and accurate account of the role of women in today’s India.

Florence Nightingale on Social Change in India
Florence Nightingale on Social Change in India

Author: Lynn McDonald

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2007-12-06

Total Pages: 952

ISBN-13: 0889204950

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This volume shows the shift of focus that occurred during Florence Nightingale's 40-plus years of work on public health in India. It documents her concrete proposals for self-government, especially at the municipal level, and the encouragement of leading Indian nationals themselves.

Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India
Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India

Author: Kenneth Bo Nielsen

Publisher: Anthem Press

Published: 2014-08-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1783082690

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The pace of socioeconomic transformation in India over the past two and a half decades has been formidable. This volume sheds light on how these transformations have played out at the level of everyday life to influence the lives of Indian women, and gender relations more broadly. Through ethnographically grounded case studies, the authors portray the contradictory and contested co-existence of discrepant gendered norms, values and visions in a society caught up in wider processes of sociopolitical change. ‘Women, Gender and Everyday Social Transformation in India’ moves the debate on gender and social transformation into the domain of everyday life to arrive at locally embedded and detailed, ethnographically informed analyses of gender relations in real-life contexts that foreground both subtle and not-so-subtle negotiations and contestations.

Social networks, mobility, and political participation: The potential for women’s self-help groups to improve access and use of public entitlement schemes in India
Social networks, mobility, and political participation: The potential for women’s self-help groups to improve access and use of public entitlement schemes in India

Author: Kumar, Neha

Publisher: Intl Food Policy Res Inst

Published: 2018-08-22

Total Pages: 53

ISBN-13:

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Women’s self-help groups (SHGs) have increasingly been used as a vehicle for social, political, and economic empowerment as well as a platform for service delivery. Although a growing body of literature shows evidence of positive impacts of SHGs on various measures of empowerment, our understanding of ways in which SHGs improve awareness and use of public services is limited. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper first examines how SHG membership is associated with political participation, awareness, and use of government entitlement schemes. It further examines the effect of SHG membership on various measures of social networks and mobility. Using data collected in 2015 across five Indian states and matching methods to correct for endogeneity of SHG membership, we find that SHG members are more politically engaged. We also find that SHG members are not only more likely to know of certain public entitlements than non-members, they are significantly more likely to avail of a greater number of public entitlement schemes. Additionally, SHG members have wider social networks and greater mobility as compared to non-members. Our results suggest that SHGs have the potential to increase their members’ ability to hold public entities accountable and demand what is rightfully theirs. An important insight, however, is that the SHGs themselves cannot be expected to increase knowledge of public entitlement schemes in absence of a deliberate effort to do so by an external agency.

Women, Power, and Property
Women, Power, and Property

Author: Rachel E. Brulé

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-10-22

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1108870600

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Quotas for women in government have swept the globe. Yet we know little about their capacity to upend entrenched social, political, and economic hierarchies. Women, Power, and Property explores this question within the context of India, the world's largest democracy. Brulé employs a research design that maximizes causal inference alongside extensive field research to explain the relationship between political representation, backlash, and economic empowerment. Her findings show that women in government – gatekeepers – catalyze access to fundamental economic rights to property. Women in politics have the power to support constituent rights at critical junctures, such as marriage negotiations, when they can strike integrative solutions to intrahousehold bargaining. Yet there is a paradox: quotas are essential for enforcement of rights, but they generate backlash against women who gain rights without bargaining leverage. In this groundbreaking study, Brulé shows how well-designed quotas can operate as a crucial tool to foster equality and benefit the women they are meant to empower.

Gender and Neoliberalism
Gender and Neoliberalism

Author: Elisabeth Armstrong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-07

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 1317911415

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This book describes the changing landscape of women’s politics for equality and liberation during the rise of neoliberalism in India. Between 1991 and 2006, the doctrine of liberalization guided Indian politics and economic policy. These neoliberal measures vastly reduced poverty alleviation schemes, price supports for poor farmers, and opened India’s economy to the unpredictability of global financial fluctuations. During this same period, the All India Democratic Women’s Association, which directly opposed the ascendance of neoliberal economics and policies, as well as the simultaneous rise of violent casteism and anti-Muslim communalism, grew from roughly three million members to over ten million. Beginning in the late 1980s, AIDWA turned its attention to women’s lives in rural India. Using a method that began with activist research, the organization developed a sectoral analysis of groups of women who were hardest hit in the new neoliberal order, including Muslim women, and Dalit (oppressed caste) women. AIDWA developed what leaders called inter-sectoral organizing, that centered the demands of the most vulnerable women into the heart of its campaigns and its ideology for social change. Through long-term ethnographic research, predominantly in the northern state of Haryana and the southern state of Tamil Nadu, this book shows how a socialist women’s organization built its oppositional strength by organizing the women most marginalized by neoliberal policies and economics.

Women and Power in the Middle East
Women and Power in the Middle East

Author: Suad Joseph

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2011-10-20

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 0812206908

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The seventeen essays in Women and Power in the Middle East analyze the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that shape gender systems in the Middle East and North Africa. Published at different times in Middle East Report, the journal of the Middle East Research and Information Project, the essays document empirically the similarities and differences in the gendering of relations of power in twelve countries—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iran. Together they seek to build a framework for understanding broad patterns of gender in the Arab-Islamic world. Challenging questions are addressed throughout. What roles have women played in politics in this region? When and why are women politically mobilized, and which women? Does the nature and impact of their mobilization differ if it is initiated by the state, nationalist movements, revolutionary parties, or spontaneous revolt? And what happens to women when those agents of mobilization win or lose? In investigating these and other issues, the essays take a look at the impact of rapid social change in the Arab-Islamic world. They also analyze Arab disillusionment with the radical nationalisms of the 1950s and 1960s and with leftist ideologies, as well as the rise of political Islamist movements. Indeed the essays present rich new approaches to assessing what political participation has meant for women in this region and how emerging national states there have dealt with organized efforts by women to influence the institutions that govern their lives. Designed for courses in Middle East, women's, and cultural studies, Women and Power in the Middle East offers to both students and scholars an excellent introduction to the study of gender in the Arab-Islamic world.