Patrons of Women

Patrons of Women PDF

Author: Esther Hertzog

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2011-05-01

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 1845459857

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Assuming that women’s empowerment would accelerate the pace of social change in rural Nepal, the World Bank urged the Nepali government to undertake a “Gender Activities Project” within an ongoing long-term water-engineering scheme. The author, an anthropologist specializing in bureaucratic organizations and gender studies, was hired to monitor the project. Analyzing her own experience as a practicing “development expert,” she demonstrates that the professed goal of “women’s empowerment” is a pretext for promoting economic organizational goals and the interests of local elites. She shows how a project intended to benefit women, through teaching them literary and agricultural skills, fails to provide them with any of the promised resources. Going beyond the conventional analysis that positions aid givers vis-à-vis powerless victimized recipients, she draws attention to the complexity of the process and the active role played by the Nepalese rural women who pursue their own interests and aspirations within this unequal world. The book makes an important contribution to the growing critique of “development” projects and of women’s development projects in particular.

Knowing and Doing

Knowing and Doing PDF

Author: Krystyna Chlebowska

Publisher: UNESCO

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 88

ISBN-13:

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How can literacy help women to become aware of their condition and know their rights and responsibilities in society? This book strives to clarify this fundamental question by sketching the lines of a new form of literacy work, better adapted to women's aspirations. Contents include: planning, awareness campaigns, field surveys, programmes, organizing operations, literacy personnel, follow-up and a bibliography.

Gender and Power in the Pacific

Gender and Power in the Pacific PDF

Author: Katarina Ferro

Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 9783825867102

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Women from the Pacific Islands are often perceived by Europeans as passive beauties dancing the hula with a flower in their hair, as docile companions of European or local men or as naive personalities surrounded by an endangered environment. But far from that male Western reception of women's status, which can be found in documentaries, motion pictures as well as travel and adventure literature, women are active and resolute agents who self-confidently shape their societies through their courageous and determined acting in public as well as in their communities. The current volume of Novara - Contributions to Research on the Pacific wants to deliver insights into the lives of women from the Pacific Islands and shows how they deal with shifting gender relations in changing societies. Traditions and adjustment processes to changing living conditions of women and men in Papua New Guinea, Palau and New Zealand present fascinating research fields, which open up the view to new living models apart from Western gender concepts.