Traditional ways of dividing work by gender are disappearing and new ways of ordering our lives are emerging. Today, women and men engage in various forms of work in the course of a lifetime: work for pay, housework, family care-taking work, volunteer work. Our expansion of work roles holds great promise for our personal development, the well-being of families, and the health of society. We can weave together all forms of work, with determination and imagination, as we open doors for future generations. Our attitudes, values, and world views are changing along with our working patterns. Old ideal images, now limiting and harmful, are losing their power. Opportunities for theological reformation emerge based on a new understanding of human nature, just love, and the order of society. We live in an accelerating time of great change and great consequence. This is a book for such a time.

Since the second half of the 1980s social movements, which questioned the legitimacy of the hitherto seemingly stable systems of Kemalist Turkey and socialist Balkans, won ground. Political Islam struck Turkey; in the Balkan socialist countries the dams broke, and parliamentary democracies replaced monolithic socialist regimes. These processes have not been gender neutral. Therefore the central question is: after the abolition of patriarchy and the official installation of gender equality, are patriarchy and female discrimination returning in the region through the backdoor, although in a modernized version?

This innovative book critically examines patriarchal hegemonies from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. It challenges the Anglo-American bias of much gender and language research to date by including rich new data and insights from scholars working in countries such as Colombia, Liberia, Kenya, Vietnam, Japan, Greece, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sweden, Denmark and Poland. Within these different geographical contexts, a broadly defined notion of culture incorporates organizational cultures, subcultures of society, cultures of clans or tribes as well as national cultures, depending on the meanings ascribed to the notion by people in public and private spaces. The central question of the volume, which is addressed through a variety of data, different discourse analytical approaches and research methodologies, is: How is gender constructed in social life and in patriarchal systems through discourse in different parts of the world?

The concept of 'patriarchy' is one which signals a sharp divide between traditions of feminist thought. Sylvia Walby attempts to conceptualize 'patriarchy' in a way that takes account not only of the complexity of relationships of gender, but also of the subtleties of the interconnections of patriarchy and capitalism. She rejects those accounts which treat patriarchy as a unified set of relations, or which confine the site of patriarchy to any one privileged sphere such as the family. Instead, she elaborates a novel view of patriarchy as a set of 'relatively autonomous relations', the connections between which are spelled out through a variety of detailed case studies. In contrast to many other views of 'capitalist patriarchy', Sylvia Walby characterizes the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy as a relationship, not of harmony and mutual accommodation, but of tension and conflict. This thesis is substantiated through a comparative historical analysis of three contrasting areas of employment: cotton textiles, engineering and clerical work. These analyses show the shortcomings of much conventional literature in sociology, history and economics on women's employment, which pays insufficient attention to the independence of patriarchal relations. The book draws upon sociological, historical, economic and geographic materials to argue for an understanding of gender relations in terms of the specific tensions and compromises between patriarchal and capitalist relations. Exploring the impact of the state on patterns of employment and unemployment completes a book rich in theoretical and empirical analysis. Patriarchy at Work will be recognized as a major contribution to feminist thought and the social sciences.

Gordon analyzes the interplay between capitalism, development and the status of African women. Drawing on the work of both African and Western researchers, she shows that capitalist development projects have mainly benefited a small stratum of African elites and proposes concrete strategies for making it more equitable for women.

The book provides insights into the prevailing patriarchal system in rural Pakistan. It elaborates on the kinship system in rural Sindh and explores how young married women strategize and negotiate with patriarchy. Drawing on qualitative methodologies, the book reveals the strong relationship between poverty and the perpetuation of patriarchy. Women’s strategies help elevate their position in their families, such as attention to household tasks, producing children, and doing handicraft work for their well-being. These conditions are usually seen as evidence of women’s subordination, but these are also strategies for survival where accommodation to patriarchy wins them approval. The book concludes that women’s life-long struggle is, in fact, a technique of negotiating with patriarchy. In so doing, they internalize the culture that rests on their subordination and reproduce it in older age in exercising power by oppressing other junior women.

Infertility and Patriarchy explores the lives of infertile women whose personal stories depict their daily struggles to resist disempowerment and stigmatization. Marcia C. Inhorn has produced a unique study of gender, politics, and family life in contemporary Egypt.

Weinbaum's "sexual political economy" analyzes the world or work in terms of kinship categories. A classic breakthrough between the family or work divide, this very readable book spells out her original understanding of precisely how the psycho-sexual dynamics of the oedipal family are played out in the patriarchal structure of work.

This book surveys both the part women have played in Buddhism historically and what Buddhism might become in its post-patriarchal future. The author completes the Buddhist historical record by discussing women, usually absent from histories of Buddhism, and she provides the first feminist analysis of the major concepts found in Buddhist religion. Gross demonstrates that the core teachings of Buddhism promote gender equity rather than male dominance, despite the often sexist practices found in Buddhist institutions throughout history.

The idea of the ‘Bangladesh paradox’ describes the unexpected social progress that Bangladesh has made in recent decades that has been both pro-poor and gender equitable. This began at a time when the country was characterised by extreme levels of poverty, poor quality governance, an oppressive patriarchy and rising Islamic orthodoxy. This ‘paradox’ has evoked a great deal of interest within the international development community because Bangladesh had been dubbed an ‘international basket case’ at the time of its independence in 1971, seemingly trapped in a development impasse. Previous attempts to explain this paradox have generally taken a top-down approach, focusing on the role of leading institutional actors – donors, government, NGOs and the private sector. In Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox, Naila Kabeer starts with the rationale that policy actions taken at the top are unlikely to materialise into actual changes if they are not acted on by the mass of ordinary women and men. But what led these women and men to act? And why did they act in ways that modified some of the more oppressive aspects of patriarchy in the country? That is what this book sets out to investigate. It describes the history of the Bengal delta, and the forces that gave rise to the kind of society that Bangladesh was at the time of its independence. It considers the policy and politics that characterised post-independence Bangladesh and how these contributed to the progress captured in the idea of the Bangladesh paradox. But the key argument of the book is that much of this progress reflected the agency exercised by ordinary, often very poor, women in the course of their everyday lives. Their agency helped to translate institutional actions into concrete changes on the ground. To explore why and how this happened, the book draws on a rich body of ethnographic, qualitative and quantitative research on social change in Bangladesh – including studies by the author herself. The book is therefore about how norms and practices can change in progressive ways despite unpropitious circumstances as a result of the efforts of poor women in Bangladesh to renegotiate what had been described as one of the most non-negotiable patriarchies in the world.