Women's Human Rights


Book Description

According to Susan Deller Ross, many human rights advocates still do not see women's rights as human rights. Yet women in many countries suffer from laws, practices, customs, and cultural and religious norms that consign them to a deeply inferior status. Advocates might conceive of human rights as involving torture, extrajudicial killings, or cruel and degrading treatment—all clearly in violation of international human rights—and think those issues irrelevant to women. Yet is female genital mutilation, practiced on millions of young girls and even infants, not a gross violation of human rights? When a family decides to murder a daughter in the name of "honor," is that not an extrajudicial killing? When a husband rapes or savagely beats his wife, knowing the legal authorities will take no action on her behalf, is that not cruel and degrading treatment? Women's Human Rights is the first human rights casebook to focus specifically on women's human rights. Rich with interdisciplinary material, the book advances the study of the deprivation and violence women suffer due to discriminatory laws, religions, and customs that deny them their most fundamental freedoms. It also provides present and future lawyers the legal tools for change, demonstrating how human rights treaties can be used to obtain new laws and court decisions that protect women against discrimination with respect to employment, land ownership, inheritance, subordination in marriage, domestic violence, female genital mutilation, polygamy, child marriage, and the denial of reproductive rights. Ross examines international and regional human rights treaties in depth, including treaty language and the jurisprudence and general interpretive guidelines developed by human rights bodies. By studying how international human rights law has been and can be implemented at the domestic level through local courts and legislatures, readers will understand how to call upon these newly articulated human rights to help bring about legislation, court decisions, and executive action that protect women from human rights violations.




Women, Land Rights and Rural Development


Book Description

The failure to include gender in the economic history of rural development has severely limited our understanding of privatizing, collectivist and colonial economic policies that disrupted and transformed the lives of rural women and men in the modern world. This book is unique in its focus on female economic agency, and in its exploration of the latter virtue in comparative historical perspective. It presents the apparently disparate cases of 17th-century England, 20th-century Russia and the Soviet Union, and 20th-century Kenya, as their top-down modernization projects were implemented in similar fashion --particularly in the case of women. The female half of the population was largely absent from contemporary economic databases, but nevertheless stereotyped as obstacles to rational economic decision-making. Introducing rural women and their innovations into male-centered narratives of economic history lays the foundation for a more demographically balanced and realistic understanding of rural behavior and rural development. In this study, women’s labor and land claims are the lens through which both female agency and the delegitimizing of women’s land claims become more visible. Both policy-makers and their leading critics deployed virtually identical language to describe backward, unruly and invariably “unsightly” peasant women.







Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change


Book Description

Henry Bernstein argues that class dynamics should be the starting point of any analysis of agrarian change. Providing an accessible introduction to agrarian political economy, he shows clearly how the argument for "bringing class back in" provides an alternative to inherited conceptions of the agrarian question. He also ably illustrates what is at stake in different ways of thinking about class dynamics and the effects of agrarian change in today's globalized world. CONTENTS: Introduction: The Political Economy of Agrarian Change. Production and Productivity. Origins of Early Development of Capitalism. Colonialism and Capitalism. Farming and Agriculture, Local and Global. Neoliberal Globalization and World Agriculture. Capitalist Agriculture and Non-Capitalist Farmers? Class Formation in the Countryside. Complexities of Class.







Women's Empowerment and Global Health


Book Description

"What is women's empowerment, and how and why does it matter for women's health? Despite the rise of a human rights-based approach to women's health and increasing awareness of the synergies between women's health and empowerment, a lack of consensus remains as to how to measure empowerment and successfully intervene in ways that improve health. Women's Empowerment and Global Health provides thirteen detailed, multidisciplinary case studies from across the globe and through the course of a woman's life to show how science and advocacy can be creatively merged to enhance the agency and status of women. Accompanying short videos provide background about programs on the ground in India, the United States, Mexico, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe, and South Africa. Women's Empowerment and Global Health explores the promises and limits of programmatic, scientific, and rights-based work in real-world settings and provides the next generation of researchers and practitioners, as well as students in global and public health, sociology, anthropology, women's studies, law, business, and medicine, with cutting edge and inspirational examples of programs that point the way toward achieving women's equality and fulfilling the right to health."--Provided by publisher.







Women, Business and the Law 2021


Book Description

Women, Business and the Law 2021 is the seventh in a series of annual studies measuring the laws and regulations that affect women’s economic opportunity in 190 economies. The project presents eight indicators structured around women’s interactions with the law as they move through their lives and careers: Mobility, Workplace, Pay, Marriage, Parenthood, Entrepreneurship, Assets, and Pension. This year’s report updates all indicators as of October 1, 2020 and builds evidence of the links between legal gender equality and women’s economic inclusion. By examining the economic decisions women make throughout their working lives, as well as the pace of reform over the past 50 years, Women, Business and the Law 2021 makes an important contribution to research and policy discussions about the state of women’s economic empowerment. Prepared during a global pandemic that threatens progress toward gender equality, this edition also includes important findings on government responses to COVID-19 and pilot research related to childcare and women’s access to justice.




Women, Business and the Law 2020


Book Description

The World Bank Group’s Women, Business and the Law examines laws and regulations affecting women’s prospects as entrepreneurs and employees across 190 economies. Its goal is to inform policy discussions on how to remove legal restrictions on women and promote research on how to improve women’s economic inclusion.




Challenges at the Intersection of Gender and Ethnic Identity in Kenya


Book Description

Minority and indigenous women in Kenya are discriminated against on multiple levels; they are targeted because of their identification with a minority or indigenous group, and as women – both by cultural practices within their own community and because of gender discrimination more widely. This report examines the challenges and the new opportunities that have emerged with the passing of the new Constitution in 2010. The goal of the report is to reflect the voices and experiences of women from diverse minority and indigenous communities in Kenya. For hunter-gatherer women, many of whom have been displaced and forced to become squatters, community land rights are a primary concern. They view their lack of opportunities, basic services and education for girls as a direct result of their displacement. For pastoralist women, insecurity and conflict in areas where they live has a disproportionate impact on them. Cultural practices that are harmful to girls, such as female genital mutilation and early marriage, reduce girls’ access to education and entrench women’s poverty. For fisher peoples, environmental degradation and collapsing fish stocks are major fears. Women from these communities expressed their frustration at traditional gender roles that place much of the responsibility for meeting the family’s basic needs on women. While there is strong leadership from individual women in many of the minority and indigenous communities described in this report, the majority of women face ongoing violations of their human rights. Trapped in a cycle of poverty that they attribute directly to decades of marginalization, they fear that they and their children will not be able to take advantage of gains in the new Constitution. This report highlights actions identified by minority and indigenous women that should be taken by the government and other actors to support women’s empowerment and participation in the decision-making processes that directly affect them.