This book argues for the applicability of a materialist mode of production analysis to the situation of women in Africa. It briefly reviews some of the intellectual background and current theoretical dilemmas of marxism-feminism.

Women's social status, womens rights, international division of labour, capitalist country, socialist country, developing country - womens organization, trends, historical, USA and Western Europe, cultural factors, political aspects, woman workers, capitalism, feudalism, sexual division of labour, labour productivity, colonialism, economic role, homemakers, production relations, violence, China, India, Viet Nam, case studies. Bibliography, statistical tables.

This impressive and original study is one of the first books to combine mainstream sociology with feminism in exploring the subject of the professions and power. This is an important addition to the corpus of feminist scholarship... It provides fresh insights into the way in which male power has been used to limit the employment aspirations of women in the middle classes. - Rosemary Crompton, University of Kent

A 2022 Choice Reviews Outstanding Academic Title Negotiating Patriarchy and Gender in Africa: Discourses, Practices, and Policies examines the entrenchment of patriarchy in Africa and its attendant socioeconomic and political consequences on gender relations. The contributors analyze the historical and modern ways in which gender expectations have enabled women in African societies to be systematically abused and marginalized, from unpaid labor to poor representation in decision-making areas. Exploring regions such as rural Uganda, the suburbs of Zimbabwe, the Gold Coast, South Africa, and Nigeria, contributors incorporate a wide range of academic theories and disciplines to establish the need for improved policy implementation on gender issues at both the local and national government levels in Africa.

This rich anthology offers twenty studies on instances of emerging social justice and women’s empowerment in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. These areas are home to huge populations where women’s rights have withered under patriarchal rule, and many are beset by civic unrest. The book shows how changes are occurring as flood tides of capital, people, and information erode entrenched gender regimes, giving birth to energetic and forward-thinking women’s movements. Highly original, conceptually sophisticated, and imminently readable, this book illustrates how local women are transforming their collective fates by questioning their status, forming alliances, demanding full participation in economic development and the political process, and mining opportunities afforded by globalization.

Facing Patriarchy challenges current thinking about men’s violence against women. Drawing upon radical and intersectional feminist theory and critical masculinity studies, the book locates men’s violence within the structures and processes of patriarchy. Addressing the limitations of current violence prevention policies, Bob Pease argues that a nuanced conceptualisation of patriarchy, that accounts for a variety of patriarchal structures, intersections with other forms of inequality, patriarchal ideologies, men’s peer group relations, men’s sexist practices and the construction of patriarchal subjectivities, is required to understand the links between gender and men’s violence against women. Pease shows that men’s violence against women needs to be understood in the context of other forms of men’s violence, including violence against boys and other men, in the involvement of men in wars and conflicts between nations and men’s ecologically destructive practices which constitute a form of slow violence. With crucial implications for priorities in violence prevention, gender equality promotion and in strategies for engaging men in this work, Facing Patriarchy offers new hope for the elimination of men’s violence. This is an essential book for scholars, practitioners, activists and policy makers involved in violence prevention in national and international contexts.

The book offers one of the first detailed studies of South Asian women, it provides new empirical data on the issues apparent in South Asian women's lives by 'giving voice' to a group of women who would otherwise remain silent. It is based upon an ethnographic study of a small South Asian community in an inner city. The book offers a new and compelling account of South Asian women, as well as focussing on the ways in which gender and 'race' interact in women’s lives. The book offers an important theoretical contribution to the area of feminist theory. The concept of patriarchy is contested and reworked and applied to the study of South Asian women and their cultural experiences. In this sense, practices such as arranged marriages, dowries, domestic labour and domestic finance are analyzed as different influences of patriarchy inside the household, as well as education and the labour market as influences of patriarchy outside the household.

Recent decades have witnessed both a renewed energy in feminist activism and widespread attacks taking back hard-won rights. Despite powerful feminist movements, the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly undermined the progress women have struggled for decades to achieve; how can this be? What explains this paradox of a strong feminist movement coexisting with stubborn patriarchal arrangements? How can we stop the next global catastrophe initiating a similar backlash? This book suggests that the limitations of social theory prevent feminist strategies from initiating transformative changes and achieving permanent gains. It investigates the impact of theoretical shortcomings upon feminist strategies by engaging with two clusters of work: ungendered accounts of capitalist development and theories on gendered oppression and inequality. Decentring feminist theorising grounded in histories and developments of the global North, the book provides an original theory of the patriarchal system by analysing changes within its forms and degrees as well as investigating the relationship between the gender, class and race-ethnicity based inequalities. Turkey offers a case that challenges assumptions and calls for rethinking major feminist categories and theories, thereby shedding light on the dynamics of social change in the global South. The timely intervention of this book is, therefore, crucial for feminist strategies going forward. The book emerges at the intersections between Gender, International Development, Political Economy, and Sociology and its main readership will be found in, but not limited to, these disciplinary fields. The material covered in this book will be of great interest to students and researchers in these areas as well as policy makers and feminist activists. Since publication it has been nominated for the prestigious 2023 British Sociological Association's Philip Adams Memorial Prize.

Fourteen provocative papers on the oppression of women in capitalist countries, along with three articles on the subordinate position of women in two communist countries, Cuba and China. These important, often path-breaking articles are arranged in five basic sections, the titles of which indicate the broad range of issues being considered: Introduction; motherhood, reproduction, and male supremacy; socialist feminist historical analysis; patriarchy in revolutionary society; socialist feminism in the United States. The underlying thrust of the book is toward integrating the central ideas of radical feminist thought with those pivotal for Marxist or socialist class analysis.

Explores the new politics of masculinity and gender identity, examining the contemporary discourses of masculinity by focusing on male pro-feminist movements and locating them within the context of feminist debates.