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What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group--rural women--at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women's life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women's agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting--even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

This is the first full-length history of Russian peasant women in the 20th century in English. Filling a significant gap in the literature on rural studies and gender studies of the twentieth century Russia, it is the first to take the story into the twenty-first century. It offers a comprehensive overview of regulations concerning rural women: their employment patterns; marriages, divorces and family life; issues with health and raising children. Rural lives in the Soviet Union were often dramatically different from the common narrative of the Soviet history, and even during the Khrushchev \"Thaw\" in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rural women were excluded from its reforms and liberating policies. The author, Luibov Denisova - a leading expert in the field of rural gender history in Russia - includes material from previously unavailable or unpublished collections and archives; interviews; sociological research and oral traditions. Overall, the book is a history of all rural women, from ordinary farm girls to agrarian professionals to prostitutes and paints a unique picture of rural women’s life in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. PART I. Employment patterns among rural women 1. Unskilled labor in the countryside 2. Female mechanics and machines operators 3. Women at the animal wards 4. Women as collective farm leaders and agricultural specialists 5. Rural intelligentsia 6. Migration to cities and the position of newcomers PART II. Private Life 7. The politics of private life: the evolution and transformation of the Soviet Family Code 8. Marriages 9. Conflicts and divorces 10. Domostroi 11. Alcoholism in the countryside 12. The female face of the criminal world 13. Women of the oldest profession 14. Religion 15. Triple-burden lifestyle 16. Household chores 17. The special environment of the village life 18. Protection of childhood and motherhood in the countryside 19. Abortions Liubov Denisova is Professor of History at the Russian State University of Oil and Gas. Her books include the bestselling Zhenshchiny russkikh selenii (Women of Russian Villages) and Sud’ba russkoi krestianki (The Fate of Russian Peasant Women). Irina Mukhina is Assistant Professor of History at Assumption College, Massachusetts, USA. She is author of The Germans of the Soviet Union (also published by Routledge).

As the first output from the gender and governance in rural services project, this report presents descriptive findings and qualitative analysis of accountability mechanisms in agricultural extension and rural water supply in India, Ghana, and Ethiopia, paying specific attention to gender responsiveness. The gender and governance in rural services project seeks to generate policy-relevant knowledge on strategies to improve agricultural and rural service delivery, with a focus on providing more equitable access to these services, especially for women. The project focuses on agricultural extension, as an example of an agricultural service, and drinking water, as an example of rural service that is not directly related to agriculture but is of high relevance for rural women. A main goal of this project was to generate empirical micro level evidence about the ways various accountability mechanisms for agricultural and rural service provision work in practice and to identify factors that influence the suitability of different governance reform strategies that aim to make service provision more gender responsive. Three out of four poor people in the developing world live in rural areas, and most of them depend directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihoods. Providing economic services, such as agricultural extension, is essential to using agriculture for development. At the same time, the rural poor need a range of basic services, such as drinking water, education, and health services. Such services are difficult to provide in rural areas because they are subject to the \"triple challenge\" of market, state, and community failure. As a result of market failure, the private sector does not provide these services to the rural poor to the extent that is desirable from society's point of view. The state is not very effective in providing these services either, because these services have to be provided every day throughout the country, even in remote areas, and because they require discretion and cannot easily be standardized, especially if they are demand driven. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and communities themselves are interesting alternative providers of these services, but they too can fail, because of capacity constraints and local elite capture. This triple challenge of market, state, and community failure results in the poor provision of agricultural and rural services, a major obstacle to agricultural and rural development.

Based on twenty-five years of fieldwork, Rural Women's Sexuality, Reproductive Health, and Illiteracy: A Critical Perspective on Development examines rural women's behaviors towards health in several developing countries.These women are confronted with many factors: gender inequalities, violence from partners, and lack of economic independence.

Rural women have not had a formative role in the public histories of Central Eastern Europe.Izabella Agárdi aims to correct that by concentrating on their life stories and their connections to general histories.

Putting the Barn Before the Housefeatures the voices and viewpoints of women born before World War I who lived on family farms in south-central New York. As she did in her previous book,Bonds of Community, for an earlier period in history, Grey Osterud explores the flexible and varied ways that families shared labor and highlights the strategies of mutuality that women adopted to ensure they had a say in family decision making. Sharing and exchanging work also linked neighboring households and knit the community together. Indeed, the culture of cooperation that women espoused laid the basis for the formation of cooperatives that enabled these dairy farmers to contest the power of agribusiness and obtain better returns for their labor. Osterud recounts this story through the words of the women and men who lived it and carefully explores their views about gender, labor, and power, which offered an alternative to the ideas that prevailed in American society. Most women saw \"putting the barn before the house\"-investing capital and labor in productive operations rather than spending money on consumer goods or devoting time to mere housework-as a necessary and rational course for families who were determined to make a living on the land and, if possible, to pass on viable farms to the next generation. Some women preferred working outdoors to what seemed to them the thankless tasks of urban housewives, while others worked off the farm to support the family. Husbands and wives, as well as parents and children, debated what was best and negotiated over how to allocate their limited labor and capital and plan for an uncertain future. Osterud tells the story of an agricultural community in transition amid an industrializing age with care and skill.

Much of the literature on globalization has centered on the large, macro-level forces that influence the ways ideas, people, and various forms of capital move around the world.

This research paper investigates the impact of mobile technology on empowering rural women farmers and promoting inclusive agricultural development. The primary emphasis is on how mobile technology enables rural women producers to become more self-reliant in agriculture, promotes market participation, strengthens social connections, facilitates socioeconomic integration, enhances rural quality of life, and fosters sustainable agricultural development. In addition, this study also analyses the influence of demographic factors on the use of mobile technology among rural women farmers. This study was carried out in Kerala, a renowned agricultural state in India. In Kerala, the Palakkad district is known to be the granary of Kerala due to the availability of fertile valleys, rivers, forests, and paddy fields. Data were collected from 192 rural women farmers from Palakkad via semi-structured interviews, questionnaire surveys, and focus group discussions (FGD). The data were analyzed using the paired t-test and Garratt ranking method. The results demonstrate that mobile technology markedly enhances access to agricultural information, market engagement, and social connectivity, resulting in greater empowerment for rural women farmers. Nonetheless, obstacles such as insufficient digital literacy and inadequate mobile infrastructure access persist as considerable impediments. The findings demonstrate the revolutionary potential of mobile phone use in bridging information gaps, empowering women farmers in rural areas, and advancing equitable agricultural development, as well as the barriers faced by rural women in using mobile technology.

The empowerment of rural women through sustainable entrepreneurship is pivotal for fostering economic development and social transformation in developing communities. This study examines the impact of university social responsibility (USR) programs on strengthening sustainable entrepreneurship among rural women, emphasizing the mediating role of economic empowerment. Utilizing a structural equation model (SEM), we explore causal pathways between USR interventions, entrepreneurial capacities, and the sustainability of rural businesses. Key dimensions analyzed include economic resources, social networks, and psychological self-efficacy, as well as their interrelation with community development. The findings demonstrate that multidimensional USR programs integrating technical training, social support, and economic resources significantly enhance entrepreneurial resilience and value chain integration. Notably, the analysis reveals that economic empowerment mediates the relationship between USR programs and business sustainability, with improvements in community participation and ICT quality identified as critical drivers. Furthermore, the post-intervention results highlight a shift from technology access challenges to a focus on ICT content quality and psychosocial development, reflecting maturity in community adaptation and resource utilization. This research provides empirical evidence supporting the effectiveness of USR programs in catalyzing sustainable transformations in rural contexts. The results offer actionable insights for designing targeted interventions that integrate technical, social, and economic dimensions, contributing to the advancement of sustainable entrepreneurship and rural development theory.

A rich, long-term ethnography of women seafood traders in Mexico. The \"shrimp ladies,\" locally known as changueras in southern Sinaloa, Mexico, sell seafood in open-air markets, forming an extralegal but key part of the economy built around this \"pink gold.\" Over time, they struggled to evolve from marginalized peddlers to local icons depicted in popular culture, even as they continue to work at an open-air street market. Pink Gold documents the shrimp traders' resilience and resourcefulness, from their early conflicts with the city, state, and federal authorities and forming a union, to carving out a physical space for a seafood market, and even engaging in conflicts with the Mexican military. Drawing from her two decades of fieldwork, María L. Cruz-Torres explores the inspiring narrative of this overlooked group of women involving grassroots politics, trans-border and familial networking, debt and informal economic practices, personal sacrifices, and simple courage. She argues that, amid intense economic competition, their success relies on group solidarity that creates interlocking networks of mutual trust, or confianza , that in turn enable them to cross social and political boundaries that would typically be closed to them. Ultimately, Pink Gold offers fresh insights into issues of gender and labor, urban public space, the street economy, commodities, and globalization.