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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.

Feminist political economy is essential to understanding the power relations and hierarchies that shape and sustain contemporary capitalism. Motivated by the rejection of gender-blind approaches in economics feminist political economy provides compelling insights into the relations between the economic, the social and the political in the reproduction of inequality. Sara Cantillon, Odile Mackett and Sara Stevano have written a much-needed introduction to key topics in feminist political economy, including the global division of labour, social reproduction, child and elder care, the household and intra-household inequalities, labour market inequalities, welfare regimes, the feminization of poverty and economic indicators. The authors take a global perspective throughout and engage in debates that are relevant for the Global North and/or the Global South. The book offers readers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the role of power relations and inequality in the economy and is suitable for a variety of courses in political economy, feminism, gender studies, economics, social policy and development studies.

With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism,Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

Tongan women living outside of their island homeland create and use hand-made, sometimes hybridized, textiles to maintain and rework their cultural traditions in diaspora. Central to these traditions is an ancient concept of homeland or nation-fonua-which Tongans retain as an anchor for modern nation-building. Utilizing the concept of the \"multi-territorial nation,\" the author questions the notion that living in diaspora is mutually exclusive with authentic cultural production and identity. The globalized nation the women build through gifting their barkcloth and fine mats, challenges the normative idea that nations are always geographically bounded or spatially contiguous. The work suggests that, contrary to prevalent understandings of globalization, global resource flows do not always primarily involve commodities. Focusing on first-generation Tongans in New Zealand and the relationships they forge across generations and throughout the diaspora, the book examines how these communities centralize the diaspora by innovating and adapting traditional cultural forms in unprecedented ways.

Land Grabis a rich ethnographic account of the relationship between identity politics, neoliberal development policy, and rights to resource management in Garifuna communities on the north coast of Honduras, before and after the 2009 coup d'état. The Garifuna are a people of African and Amerindian descent who were exiled to Honduras from the British colony of St. Vincent in 1797 and have long suffered from racial and cultural marginalization.Employing approaches from feminist political ecology, critical race studies, and ethnic studies,Keri Vacanti Brondo illuminates three contemporary development paradoxes in Honduras: the recognition of the rights of indigenous people at the same time as Garifuna are being displaced in the name of development; the privileging of foreign research tourists in projects that promote ecotourism but result in restricting Garifuna from traditional livelihoods; and the contradictions in Garifuna land-rights claims based on native status when mestizos are reserving rights to resources as natives themselves. Brondo's book asks a larger question: can \"freedom,\" understood as well-being, be achieved under the structures of neoliberalism? Grounding this question in the context of Garifuna relationships to territorial control and self-determination, the author explores the \"reregulation\" of Garifuna land; \"neoliberal conservation\" strategies like ecotourism, research tourism, and\"voluntourism;\" the significant issue of who controls access to property and natural resources; and the rights of women, who have been harshly impacted by \"development.\" In her conclusion, Brondo points to hopeful signs in the emergence of transnational indigenous, environmental, and feminist organizations.

Globalization and economic restructuring have decimated formal jobs in developing countries, pushing many women into informal employment such as direct selling of cosmetics, perfume, and other personal care products as a way to make up the difference between household income and expenses. In Ecuador, with its persistent economic crisis and few opportunities for financially and personally rewarding work, women increasingly choose direct selling as a way to earn income by activating their social networks. While few women earn the cars and trips that are iconic prizes in the direct selling organization, many use direct selling as part of a set of household survival strategies. In this first in-depth study of a cosmetics direct selling organization in Latin America, Erynn Masi de Casanova explores womens identities as workers, including their juggling of paid work and domestic responsibilities, their ideas about professional appearance, and their strategies for collecting money from customers. Focusing on women who work for the countrys leading direct selling organization, she offers fascinating portraits of the everyday lives of women selling personal care products in Ecuadors largest city, Guayaquil. Addressing gender relations (including a look at mens direct and indirect involvement), the importance of image, and the social and economic context of direct selling, Casanova challenges assumptions that this kind of flexible employment resolves womens work/home conflicts and offers an important new perspective on womens work in developing countries.

In 1770, tavernkeeper Abigail Stoneman called in her debts by flourishing a handful of playing cards before the Rhode Island Court of Common Pleas. Scrawled on the cards were the IOUs of drinkers whose links to Stoneman testified to women's paradoxical place in the urban economy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Stoneman did traditional women's work-boarding, feeding, cleaning, and selling alcohol-but her customers, like her creditors, underscore her connections to an expansive commercial society. These connections are central toThe Ties That Buy. Historian Ellen Hartigan-O'Connor traces the lives of urban women in early America to reveal how they used the ties of residence, work, credit, and money to shape consumer culture at a time when the politics of the marketplace was gaining national significance. Covering the period 1750-1820, the book analyzes how women such as Stoneman used and were used by shifting forms of credit and cash in an economy transitioning between neighborly exchanges and investment-oriented transactions. In this world, commerce reached into every part of life. At the hearths of multifamily homes, renters, lodgers, and recent acquaintances lived together and struck financial deals for survival. Landladies, enslaved washerwomen, shopkeepers, and hucksters sustained themselves by serving the mobile population. A new economic practice in America-shopping-mobilized hierarchical and friendly relationships into wide-ranging consumer networks that depended on these same market connections. Rhetoric emerging after the Revolution downplayed the significance of expanding female economic life in the interest of stabilizing the political order. But women were quintessential market participants, with fluid occupational identities, cross-class social and economic connections, and a firm investment in cash and commercial goods for power and meaning.

Senegalese Murid migrants have circulated cargo and currency through official and unofficial networks in Africa and the world. Muslim Families in Global Senegal focuses on trade and the transmission of enduring social value though cloth, videos of life-cycle rituals, and religious offerings. Highlighting women's participation in these networks and the financial strategies they rely on, Beth Buggenhagen reveals the deep connections between economic profits and ritual and social authority. Buggenhagen discovers that these strategies are not responses to a dispersed community in crisis, but rather produce new roles, wealth, and worth for Senegalese women in all parts of the globe.

This innovative new book is overtly and explicitly about female agency in eighteenth-century European towns. However, it positions female activity and decisions unequivocally in an urban world of institutions, laws, regulations, customs and ideologies. Gender politics complicated and shaped the day-to-day experiences of working women. Town rules and customs, as well as police and guilds' regulations, affected women's participation in the urban economy: most of the time, the formally recognized and legally accepted power of women - which is an essential component of female agency - was very limited. Yet these chapters draw attention to how women navigated these gendered terrains. As the book demonstrates, \"exclusion\" is too strong a word for the realities and pragmatism of women's everyday lives. Frequently guild and corporate regulations were more about situating women and regulating their activities, rather than preventing them from operating in the urban economy. Similarly corporate structures, which were under stress, found flexible strategies to incorporate women who through their own initiative and activities put pressure on the systems. Women could benefit from the contradictions between moral and social unwritten norms and economic regulations, and could take advantage of the tolerance or complicity of urban authorities towards illicit practices. Women with a grasp of their rights and privileges could defend themselves and exploit legal systems with its loopholes and contradictions to achieve economic independence and power.

Policies implemented in the mid to late 1990s in Ontario by Mike Harris’s Conservative government have had undeniable repercussions for the population of that province. Kate Bezanson’s Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction is the first study to consider the implications of those policies for gender relations – that is, how women and men, families, and households coped with these changes, and how division of labour and standards of living were affected. Bezanson also considers implications of neo-liberalism more generally, for the lives of people living under such regimes. Beginning with an outline of the restructuring experiment which took place under the Conservative government between 1995 and 2000, Bezanson shows how this process dramatically altered the scope of the welfare state, labour market protections and conditions, and the capacity for people to manage and plan their own lives. She combines this detailed investigation of the changes introduced by Harris with data collected in in-depth interviews of selected Ontario households, in order to examine how neo-liberalism affects daily lives, particularly of low income people, and especially of women. Ultimately, Bezanson finds that the neo-liberal restructuring of Ontario in the 1990s consolidated a gender regime that was highly unsustainable for poor households, many of which were lead by women. A controversial and illuminating study, Gender, the State, and Social Reproduction crosses the disciplines of politics, history, gender studies, and sociology.