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Women’s Labor in the Global Economy: Speaking in Multiple Voices, Ed. Sharon Harley (Rutgers University Press, 2007, $23.95 paperback)
Recognizing that women’s labor operates within complex economic and social schemas, this anthology’s authors assert the role of women of color as variously empowered agents in the global marketplace. Editor Sharon Harley seeks to inspire readers toward “greater resistance against the hegemonic powers” that disenfranchise women of color around the globe. The essays she selects for this task demonstrate that both oppression and resistance arise in diverse settings, inflecting the personal experiences and systemic realities of women whose economic participation transpires in inherently transnational contexts. Whether honoring the personal histories of activists like Luisa Moreno, interrogating the legal systems that fail to protect women farmworkers from assault, or illustrating the gendering of sugar production in Sri Lanka, the essays suggest the complexity of the systems that simultaneously limit and enable women’s economic and political agency.
As a collection of research intended to inspire action, Women’s Labor in the Global Economy is ambitious but effective. By self-consciously blurring the boundaries between local and global, legal and illegal, the anthology illustrates and interrogates a global system of gendered labor constructed from local customs and practices. By focusing on individual women’s voices, the authors attest to the deeply personal experiences that inflect women’s variously empowered decisions about economic participation. While honoring these women’s stories, the volume recognizes the limits of individual empowerment--and, perhaps, mobilizes the knowledge economy in which it operates to better instigate global change.
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Women, Politics, and Power: A Global Perspective, Pamela Paxton and Melanie M. Hughes (Pine Forge Press, 2007, $36.95 paperback)
Authors Paxton and Hughes offer a solid elementary introduction to the current state of women’s political leadership throughout the globe in this exhaustively researched and approachable volume. Beginning by defining such basic terms as power, gender, and feminism, and by outlining such cultural phenomena as the nineteenth-century American “cult of true womanhood,” the authors proceed to detail the current levels of political participation available to women throughout the globe. In analyzing the relationship between gender and leadership, they smartly approach such questions as “Are Female Leaders Different From Men?” and “Do Women Make a Difference?” These questions render complex debates about women’s leadership understandable for students unfamiliar with gender analysis. Recent data solidifies the United States’ place at the “middle of the pack” of gender equity in politics.
Although the volume is clearly written with an audience of U.S. college students in mind, and much of its space is dedicated to the culture and history of the United States, the authors even-handedly take into account traditions and practices around the globe (if ultimately more for comparison to U.S. politics than for the sake of independent analysis). By citing specific examples and contradictory evidence, they avoid the trap of overgeneralization as they compare “women’s leadership” to men’s. As a whole, the book is a comprehensive feminist overview to an essential topic, suitable for inclusion in an introductory class on politics or women’s studies.
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The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders, Kathy Davis (Duke University Press, 2007, $22.95 paperback)
Locating the Our Bodies, Ourselves within the context of transnational feminism, Kathy Davis describes the much-treasured guidebook as an “epistemological project” that joins theory and practice, U.S. and global activism, in a collaborative process of revision and re-creation. Relying on interviews and archives as well as current feminist scholarship, Davis traces the book from its origins in the late-sixties meetings of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective through its translation and adaptation for international audiences. Her history simultaneously interrogates two myths: that of a group of untrained amateurs taking on the medical profession, and that of global feminists as passive recipients of the translated text.
Davis’s study is balanced and informative. The author explores the problems that arise when middle-class white heterosexual American women create a text meant for women of all races, ethnicities, sexualities, socioeconomic positions, and nationalities. She also acknowledges the critical dismissal of the book, which continues to posit it as an activist manual with limited epistemological relevance. Yet Davis herself ultimately takes a more hopeful stance, arguing that Our Bodies, Ourselves is both theoretically relevant and emblematic of the potential for international exchange that supersedes the framework of feminist “waves.” Davis’s study gestures toward feminism’s potential to transcend boundaries without obliterating differences; she honors earlier feminist efforts without obfuscating their limitations.
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