The process of globalization has had a dramatic impact on the lives of women in developing countries. In the past decade, they have been increasingly drawn into insecure flexible employment working for the world market. This book explores the experiences of women in diverse local contexts within different cultures and faiths, drawing on case studies from Asia, Africa and Latin America. It draws out the contradictory and fragmented impact of globalization at the local level on the lives of women in the developing world.

This study of feminism, equity and change in the academy is based on interviews with 40 feminist academics and students in Britain, Sweden and Greece. The research attempts to decode and disentangle gendered message systems and the matrix of power relations in the academy. It consists of feminist readings of the micro-processes of everyday practices. Change is interrogated in relation to feminist pedagogy, equity, organizational culture, policies and discourses of New Right reform, mass expansion and new managerialism.

International Perspectives on Gender and Democratization brings together the experience of women's democratic movements in different countries and regions, North and South, and assesses how different discourses of democracy have been used by women's groups to assert women's rights. Sensitive to particular histories, ideologies, and cultural contexts, the contributors assess the strengths and the problems facing women's democratic movements as they consolidate their gains and face new challenges.

The authors in this volume address the questions 'What is empowerment?' Is it power over resources? Is it the ability to create 'effective demand'? Is it about the ability to make choices? Is it about access to resources and how they are controlled, politically, economically, by NGOs, by political parties, by the state? Do political parties facilitate or do they channel energies away from empowerment? They evaluate how in different circumstances different political agents have been seen as provider of resources.

Examines Polish women's oppression before, on the cusp and after the collapse of communism. The book analyzes the relationship between Solidarity, state capitalism, nationalism and feminism by drawing on a wide variety of source material.

Women presented the first effective challenge to the Islamic regime and the clerical authority in post-revolutionary Iran. Women's activism in support of their legal rights and personal freedom, however, did not develop into a strong movement against the rising fundamentalism. The Iranian socialists did not support women's autonomous organizations. The convergence of the Left's populism with Islamic populism, and the influence of the Iranian/Shiite political culture that promotes male authority and female submission, could not reconcile with women's claims to individual rights, choice, and...

Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50, explores the meanings and experience of home and private life for women who grew up in England before 1950. It considers the extent to which class, suburbanisation and historical moment as well as gender constructed women's understanding of domesticity, and discusses the part played by conceptions of home and private life in the shaping of identities. Oral narratives, fiction, autobiography and diaries are used in conjunction with psychoanalytic, linguistic and historical explanations of women's lives to map a psychological as well as a...