The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, founded in 1972, is the umbrella organization for some 600 women's groups in Canada. The authors of this study argue that, if women's movements are to achieve their equality goals, they must develop enduring institutions that allow women's efforts to be organized over the course of several generations. The authors examine the process of institutionalization through an in-depth study of the National Action Committee. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In Seriously!, Cynthia Enloe, author of the groundbreaking analysis of globalization, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases, addresses two deeply gendered and contested questions: Who is taken seriously? And who gets to bestow the label “serious” on others? With a strategy of taking both women and gender dynamics seriously, Cynthia Enloe investigates the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair and the banking crash of 2008, the subsequent recession, as well as UN peacekeeping and the ongoing Egyptian revolution. Each case study highlights the gritty experiences of women in diverse circumstances—in banks, on the job market, in war zones, and in revolutions. The results of taking women seriously are fresh insights into what fuels the cultures of hyper–risk taking, of sexual harassment, and the denial of women’s post-war security.
Gloria Steinem, one of the most iconic feminist thinkers of the world, spent her early years in India. Her time in the country revealed to Gloria the Gandhian insight that change, like a tree, must grow from the bottom up. Subsequently, her decades of work with the feminist movement in the US and across the world taught her that violence and domination are normalized by the false division of human beings into subject and object, the dominator and the dominated, 'masculine' and 'feminine'. In As if Women Matter, Gloria Steinem and activist Ruchira Gupta bring together a selection of ground-breaking essays by Gloria which, since the time that they were first written, have transcended borders and have laid the groundwork for much of modern feminist thought. In these pages, Gloria demonstrates how racism and discrimination based on caste and class differences cannot survive without controlling women's bodies-she also describes the many ways in which women and men are fighting that control. She brilliantly analyzes Adolf Hitler's obsession with masculinity, and finds a gendered understanding of violence in the making. She distinguishes between erotica and pornography, locating the difference between the two in the inequality that governs relations between the sexes. And, in addition to a trenchant account of a few days she spent as a Playboy Bunny, this volume also carries a never-before-published essay on sex trafficking by Gloria, 'The Third Way'. As if Women Matter is scholarly, profound, and leavened by a lightness of touch which makes the most complex arguments accessible to all readers.
The novel starts in 1972. Four women, whose consciousness-raising group becomes a life-long, life-saving family of the heart, wrestle with marriage, motherhood, careers and sex, during a time when no one knew the rules anymore, and it was all up for grabs.
To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.
While the stereotype of the persistently pregnant Mexican-origin woman is longstanding, in the past fifteen years her reproduction has been targeted as a major social problem for the United States. Due to fear-fueled news reports and public perceptions about the changing composition of the nation's racial and ethnic makeup—the so-called Latinization of America—the reproduction of Mexican immigrant women has become a central theme in contemporary U. S. politics since the early 1990s. In this exploration, Elena R. Gutiérrez considers these public stereotypes of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women as "hyper-fertile baby machines" who "breed like rabbits." She draws on social constructionist perspectives to examine the historical and sociopolitical evolution of these racial ideologies, and the related beliefs that Mexican-origin families are unduly large and that Mexican American and Mexican immigrant women do not use birth control. Using the coercive sterilization of Mexican-origin women in Los Angeles as a case study, Gutiérrez opens a dialogue on the racial politics of reproduction, and how they have developed for women of Mexican origin in the United States. She illustrates how the ways we talk and think about reproduction are part of a system of racial domination that shapes social policy and affects individual women's lives.
A strong polity provides political freedom, education, economic and social opportunities, transparency and protective security for its people. Sen’s capability theory, a social justice provider? Men and Women, are they likewise endowed? Are Papathy’s, Rasammah’s and Sundari’s poverty, situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban or rural? Media rides rough shod feminism bullied and dress codes change. MAS won, AirAsia and the Government lost when Bea, Shima and Nor became pregnant. The law is an ass. Avoid debt traps lest lawful unions be set asunder. Billa distributes drugs, Donna does dud cheques while Vera gets pregnant before marriage. Read all this in the real life compilation of Malaysian women.
In August 1972, Newsweek proclaimed that “the person in Washington who has done the most for the women’s movement may be Richard Nixon.” Today, opinions of the Nixon administration are strongly colored by foreign policy successes and the Watergate debacle. Its accomplishments in advancing the role of women in government have been largely forgotten. Based on the “A Few Good Women” oral history project at the Penn State University Libraries, A Matter of Simple Justice illuminates the administration’s groundbreaking efforts to expand the role of women—and the long-term consequences for women in the American workplace. At the forefront of these efforts was Barbara Hackman Franklin, a staff assistant to the president who was hired to recruit more women into the upper levels of the federal government. Franklin, at the direction of President Nixon, White House counselor Robert Finch, and personnel director Fred Malek, became the administration’s de facto spokesperson on women’s issues. She helped bring more than one hundred women into executive positions in the government and created a talent bank of more than a thousand names of qualified women. The Nixon administration expanded the numbers of women on presidential commissions and boards, changed civil service rules to open thousands more federal jobs to women, and expanded enforcement of antidiscrimination laws to include gender discrimination. Also during this time, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment and Nixon signed Title IX of the Education Amendments into law. The story of Barbara Hackman Franklin and those “few good women” shows how the advances that were made in this time by a Republican presidency both reflected the national debate over the role of women in society and took major steps toward equality in the workplace for women.
The discussions about the ethical, political and human implications of the postmodernist condition have been raging for longer than most of us care to remember. They have been especially fierce within feminism. After a brief flirtation with postmodern thinking in the 1980s, mainstream feminist circles seem to have turned their back on the staple notions of poststructuralist philosophy. Metamorphoses takes stock of the situation and attempts to reset priorities within the poststructuralist feminist agenda. Cross-referring in a creative way to Deleuze's and Irigaray's respective philosophies of difference, the book addresses key notions such as embodiment, immanence, sexual difference, nomadism and the materiality of the subject. Metamorphoses also focuses on the implications of these theories for cultural criticism and a redefinition of politics. It provides a vivid overview of contemporary culture, with special emphasis on technology, the monstrous imaginary and the recurrent obsession with 'the flesh' in the age of techno-bodies. This highly original contribution to current debates is written for those who find changes and transformations challenging and necessary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, social theory and cultural studies.
