A GENDERED CONTEXT OF OPPORTUNITY:

Current research has failed to examine how women's opportunities in the labor market, in combination with their human capital attributes, differentially affect the likelihood that they will live in poverty. This study overcomes this limitation by placing specific emphasis on the role that labor market opportunities play in contributing to, or reducing, women's and men's risk of poverty. In addition, differences in poverty risk by urban and rural labor market areas are examined, as labor market dynamics vary substantially by rurality. Using the PUMS-L and STF3C for 1990, logistic regression techniques are employed to address these issues. Our results indicate that women across all labor market contexts have a significantly higher risk of poverty than men, and incorporation of labor market characteristics fails to explain this higher risk. However, the economic opportunities available in the labor market play an important role in determining how an individual's credentials, family background, and work experience translate into poverty risk. While individual attributes play a smaller role in explaining rural women's likelihood of living in poverty, women in both urban and rural labor markets face more limited economic opportunities than their male counterparts. This suggests that a "gendered" context of opportunity remains a barrier for women's movement out of poverty in both urban and rural labor markets.     

Do Schooling and Work Empower Women in Developing Countries? Gender and Domestic Decisions in Sri Lanka

Our work challenges and points out the limitations of the theoretical presumptions underlying the relationship between empowerment, education, and employment that have been emphasized in both the exiting literature and the current rhetoric to empower women in developing countries. We use survey, life history, and focus group data to empirically examine the relationship between schooling, paid work, and power in domestic decision making for young, married women in Sri Lanka. We argue that the relationship between education, work, and women's control of household decisions is conditioned by the larger social context, and as such, it is likely to reflect the extent to which the division of labor and access to information and economic resources are the bases of domestic power in the society under consideration. Our results make a strong case for the need to move away from broad-based conceptualizations of women's empowerment to a consideration of the specific arenas and dimensions along which women can have power. In focusing on the domestic arena alone, we find that there are important differences in both the nature and determinants of the financial as opposed to the social and organizational dimension of power in Sri Lankan households. Women who control one of these aspects of family decisions do not necessarily control the other, and while education and employment play an important role in determining women's input in financial decisions, they are largely immaterial in determining household decisions related to social and organizational matters. Our results also demonstrate the importance of going beyong simplistic and limited measures of schooling and work to consider more fundamental structural factors involving family, social, and economic organization.     

Editorial

This editorial introduces a journal devoted to the issues surrounding women and their rights. As the development debate moves from women's need to their rights and to an understanding of the cultural roots of legal systems and the effects of the mass media in presenting alternative life styles as possibilities, the immense implications of using rights-based language in development emerge. This debate moves women from being the recipients of welfare to a state of empowerment. Women must be afforded individual rights which are linked to community rights. In addition, rights must be granted to women in their public and private domains. The dangers of using a rights-based language to assert women's claims to economic, political, and social equality in economic, political, and social life arise from the reality that the social position of men will usually place men at an advantage with the law. Legal processes which stress dichotomies may fail to improve real social situations. Also, the language of human rights may pit one set of rights (a woman's right to choose abortion) against another (the fetuses' right to live) to women's disadvantage. Areas governed by both customary and civil law pose other difficulties, especially since they require women to understand the law in order to use it. Development efforts which stress rights hope to meet immediate needs and to achieve a strategic end. Nongovernmental organizations can play an important role in asserting and enforcing the freedom of individuals and groups within groups. They can also build capacity at all levels of society and explore linkages between women's economic participation, decision-making within the home, and wider political participation.     

The provisioning responsibilities of older women

Conceptual frameworks that theorize relationship based work, caring and provisioning, are considered. It is argued that provisioning has greater potential for revealing the various dimensions of older women's contributions to society and citizenship claims. Data on the work and responsibilities of older women are presented. Participants belong to a group promoting public discussion on issues of security and justice for older women. This group was one of six research sites documenting the provisioning work done by women in diverse social locations. Findings reveal that older women carry large and complex provisioning responsibilities. This work is summarized under two categories: provisioning activities and provisioning strategies. Discussion of the findings focuses on three major issues facing older women: the unexpected magnitude of provisioning work they are doing; how to integrate the realities of an aging body into provisioning expectations; setting priorities when time is a scarce resource. Implications for theory and the citizenship claims of older women are considered.     

Asian Women,Job Training and the Social Organization of Immigrant Labor Markets

This paper examines the entry of Asian immigrant women into a gendered labor market via government-funded job training programs. The focus is on the intake processing of clients into an employment training program operated by a community based organization. The study reveals that women's family responsibilities and the cultural capital they bring function to screen them into or out of training programs and ultimately shape their location in the workforce. The study thus draws attention to how race, class, and gender enter into the organization of Asian immigrant women into the labor market. This investigation is based in institutional ethnography (Smith 1987), a research strategy which displays how activities in a particular setting are coordinated with more extended forms of social organization. The study shows that the overriding concern with successful placement in a job as mandated by government regulations is a critical factor in selecting the women for these programs.     

Women's legal knowledge: a case study of Mexican urban dwellers

In Mexico, the nongovernmental organization Sevisio, Desarrollo y Paz, A.C. (SEDEPAC) is helping poor women acquire legal knowledge in an economic climate characterized by the increased feminization of poverty brought about by the Structural Adjustment Program. The Mexican legal system is grounded in a patriarchal tradition, and the codified laws continue to favor men. Women were not granted full citizenship until 1953, and discrimination against women was not addressed in Mexican law until 1974 as the country prepared to host the First UN International Women's Conference. However, legal advances are not being applied in the family or in larger society where men remain in power. Mexico also distinguishes between private law and public law. Because domestic violence falls in the realm of private law, authorities are loathe to follow-up on women's complaints in this area. Since its founding in 1983, SEDEPAC has applied a gender perspective to its activities and programs. SEDEPAC held its first women's legal workshop in 1987 and realized that most poor women have no knowledge of existing laws or their rights, that alternative legal services for women are scarce, that existing laws must be changed, and that the authoritarian and conservative legal system helps maintain cultural stereotypes. Since then, SEDEPAC has held annual workshops, follow-up meetings, and training sessions and has provided counseling. The main topics addressed are women's social conditions; violence and the penal code; civil rights, power, and dependency; women's bodies and reproductive rights; and women's organization and leadership. The workshops use techniques of popular education such as group participation and use of gossip as a communication tool. The workshops have changed participants' lives and led to the formation of an independent Popular Defenders' Coordination.     

Why Has the Ethics of Care Become an Issue of Global Concern?

Since Carol Gilligan published her masterpiece, In a Different Voice, many scholars, especially feminist scholars in various fields, including moral theory, philosophy, and political and legal theory, have been inspired to establish a more inclusive approach to social injustice as well as sexual inequality. The purpose of this article is to explore the depth and expanse of the ethics of care for its potential as a political philosophy. To pursue this end, the article analyzes first the main claims of care ethics by responding to its typical counterarguments, which criticize the ethics of care as being too dependent on gender differences, particularism, and essentialism. The second section examines three challenges that care ethics poses to the male-oriented mainstream of political philosophy, especially the theory of justice. The ethics of care provides us with a new approach to moral and political issues because it focuses responsively on social injustice, proposes a new idea of relational self and takes the social connection model to justice. With these three perspectives proposed by the ethics of care in mind, the article turns its eyes to global implications of care ethics by referring to the issue of the “comfort women” of Japanese troops during the Second World War.     

A Privileged Pole? Diversity in Women's Pay,Pensions and Wealth in Britain

Is gender on its own becoming redundant in the analysis of employment experiences? There is a growing interest in economic diversity amongst women within the social sciences, with commentators suggesting, firstly, that a polarization in women's labour market experiences is occurring. Secondly, economic diversity amongst women may even be so distinct that a privileged pole is faring substantially better in wage and occupational terms than most men. This article uses data from the Family Resources Survey to explore these two suggestions. It concludes that the success on the labour market that has been achieved by an economically privileged pole amongst women supports the decline in the power of gender to explain variation in occupational patterns and wages, but it is clear that gender (tempered with awareness of the ways that it is cross‐cut by class, ethnicity and other social divisions) remains an invaluable explanatory variable for our understanding of economic security in its fuller sense, not least in the pension positions of women.     

Women's strategies in Dutch philanthropy

Dutch women have historically been philanthropists, with an emphasis on the giving of time. This article describes several strategies in which Dutch women have used philanthropy in different periods of time and in different social situations to widen their scope of action for themselves. The giving of time was partly related to the burgher ideal of domestic family culture, in which women were not supposed to join the labour force but instead become caring mothers and spick-and-span housewives. Another factor was the relative prosperity of the nation: the income of the male breadwinner was enough to support the whole household. To maintain social contacts and to gain prestige without abrogating social, religious and community norms, married women turned to philanthropic and volunteer organisations, especially in social services, welfare and health care. Many of them found a life-time occupation in volunteering. They created a parallel power structure in the public sphere. More recently, giving of time has become a means of gaining work experience. Volunteering has become an instrument to accomplish women's liberation, by building women's organisations, and interest and self-help groups.     

Does land ownership make a difference? Women's roles in agriculture in Kerala,India

Drawing on a 12-month study, this paper explores the role of women in agriculture in Kerala, India. Despite claims that women enjoy high status in Kerala, economic, social, and cultural factors interplay to reinforce gender differences in ownership, control over, and access to critical agricultural resources, including land. Although women may gain access to land through inheritance, marriage, or informal networks, none of this guarantee effective control over it. The traditional rights of women to land have not been adequately recognized: the gender gap in the ownership and control of property is the only most significant contributor to the gender gap in the economic well-being, social status, and empowerment of women. The existing socioeconomic changes and crisis which render agricultural land as a main source of livelihood, is leading nair women's share of land being sold, with gains going to men, thus decreasing women?s ownership of land to the status of male-controlled dowry. The case of the Christian succession laws in Kerala illustrate that legal provisions alone can have a limited impact on changing gendered power structures. The role of women in agriculture needs to be recognized, and institutional support must be increased in order for women to gain access to agricultural inputs and technology, which in turn, leads to better agricultural practices and a higher income from farming in the country. Most importantly, there should be a concerted effort to enable women to function as independent farmers who control their own land.     

Institutional Ethnography and Experience as Data

Experience, as concept, is contested among feminists as to its epistemological status, thus its usefulness in knowledge claims. Institutional ethnography (Smith 1987) is a feminist methodology that nonetheless relies fundamentally on people's experience. Not as Truth, nor the object of inquiry, but as thepoint d'appui for sociological inquiry. This article offers a demonstration of institutional enthnography using observational and interview data that show experience as methodologically central to a trustworthy analysis. A moment in the work lives of nursing assistants in a long-term care setting is captured by a participant observer. The analysis produces two lines of argument. One is methodological; it is argued that nursing assistants' experiences are an entry into the social relations of the setting that, when mapped and disclosed, make those experiences understandable in terms of the ruling arrangements permeating both the organization and their own experiences. The other argument is substantive; the inquiry uncovers how a quality improvement' strategy in a long term care hospital in Canada is reorganizing caregivers' values and practices toward a market orientation in which care appears to be compromised. Use of experience as data in this approach holds the analysis accountable to everyday/everynight actualities in a lived world.     

Scissors, Surveys, And Psycho-Prophylactics: Prenatal Health Care Campaigns And State Building In China, 1949–1954

This paper examines how the Chinese state's prenatal health care campaigns of the early 1950s attempted to redefine women's social and political roles. The replacement of local midwifing practices with a uniform birthing method in order to radically reduce infant and mother mortality entailed complex ramifications regarding the relationship of women vis-a-vis the state. Campaigns involved demonizing "traditional" midwifing, promoting a statistical vision of female reproductivity and children as national resources, and the isolation of individual mothers as directly responsible to the state for managing reproduction for the national interest. In sum, a physiological definition of gender was used to open women's bodies to state management. Utopic visions of painless childbirth and of the socialist nation as a giant new family were used to promote participation in grassroots campaigns, but the sources also point to forms of local resistance to the micro-level reorganization of power these campaigns intended.     

Candidate Evaluations by Men and Women

A widely accepted generalization in the social science literatureis that women tend to personalize politics and politicians.The purpose of this article is twofold. The first is to determinewhether an analysis of the available U.S. survey data from 1952to 1976 tends to support the claims made about how women differfrom men in their assessments of politicians. The second isto suggest alternative and more precise ways of conceptualizingboth men's and women's responsesto and evaluation of politicalleaders.     

The Politics of Women's Economic Independence

We identify the political conditions that shape the economicposition of married/cohabiting women and of the economicallymost vulnerable group of women—single mothers. Specifically,we examine the determinants of reductions in single mothers'poverty rate due to taxes and transfers, and women's wages relativeto spouses'/ partners' wages. The Luxembourg Income Study archiveyields an unbalanced panel with 71 observations on 15 countries.The principal determinants of poverty reduction due to taxesand transfers are left government, constitutional veto points,and welfare generosity. The relative wage of women in couplesis a function mainly of female labor force participation, parttime work among women, and women's mobilization. In explainingthe causal pathways to these outcomes, we highlight the interrelationshipsof welfare state, care, and labor market policies.     

Corporate corruption of the environment: sustainability as a process of compromise

A key response to environmental degradation, climate change and declining biodiversity has been the growing adoption of market principles in an effort to better value the social good of nature. Through concepts such as ‘natural capitalism’ and ‘corporate environmentalism’, nature is increasingly viewed as a domain of capitalist endeavour. In this article, we use convention theory and a pluralist understanding of social goods to investigate how the social good of the environment is usurped by the alternate social good of the market. Through analysis of interviews with sustainability managers and corporate documentation, we highlight how organizational actors employ compromise to temporally settle disputes between competing claims about environmental activities. Our findings contribute to an understanding of the processes of empirically grounded critique and the under‐theorized concept of compromise between social goods. Rather than protecting the environment, the corporate promotion of sustainability facilitates the corruption of the social good of the environment and its conversion into a market commodity.     

Disabled Women and Reproductive Rights

Both the women's and disability rights movements have paid scant attention to the concerns of disabled women, especially involving sexuality, reproductive freedom and mothering. Although their concerns may seem opposite of the women's movement's primary agenda, they are based on the same position: women must not be defined solely by biological characteristics and have the right to make decisions about their bodies and lives. Disabled feminists often support 'reproductive rights', but also have different perspectives on abortion and reproductive technologies than non-disabled feminists. The literature indicates that the reproductive rights of disabled women are constrained by: the assumption that disabled women are asexual; lack of reproductive health care, contraception, and sexuality information; and, social resistance to reproduction and mothering among disabled women. Disabled women are at risk for a range of undesirable outcomes, including coercive sterilization, abortion or loss of child custody.     

Social Exchange and Sexual Behavior in Young Women's Premarital Relationships in Kenya

Transactional sex, or the exchange of money and gifts for sexual activities within nonmarital relationships, has been widely considered a contributing factor to the disproportionate prevalence of HIV/AIDS among young women in sub-Saharan Africa. This study applied social exchange theory to premarital relationships in order to investigate the linkages between a variety of young women's resources-including employment and material transfers from male partners-and sexual behaviors. Data on the first month of premarital relationships (N=551 relationships) were collected from a random sample of young adult women ages 18-24 in Kisumu, Kenya, using a retrospective life history calendar. Consistent with the hypotheses, results showed that young women's income increases the likelihood of safer sexual activities, including delaying sex and using condoms consistently. Material transfers from the male partner displayed the opposite effect, supporting the view that resources obtained from within the relationship decrease young women's negotiating power.     

Women,conflict, and culture in former Yugoslavia

The civil war in the former Yugoslavia has taken a toll on the women's movement which has disintegrated across male-defined nationalist borders. The women's movement in this area got its start during the Second World War but was disbanded under communism until women's groups began to form in the 1970s. Today the women's movement has lost the power to oppose the war and has been unable to prevent widespread violence perpetuated against women. Some feminists who have refused to embrace nationalism and patriotism have been vilified and have had to seek refuge abroad. Recently, however, hundreds of nongovernmental organizations have been formed to provide support to women and children victimized by the war. Women have been raped and impregnated as a strategy of male warfare, and raped women who refused an abortion were ostracized. War-related rape has yet to be fully recognized as an international human rights violation, and the issue is being used as political propaganda in the former Yugoslavia while it is ignored elsewhere. Sensationalist reporting of these rapes has further victimized women and made them unable to give voice to their trauma. War also increases women's suffering by destroying economic and social welfare systems. Oxfam is helping women record their testimonies of war and reconstruct the fabric of their societies through programs which provide income-generation and training in micro-enterprises. In addition, Oxfam is strengthening electronic communication and networking among women's groups throughout the region.     

Women and changes in the Chilean economy: some questions

The author argues that a new development model that encourages greater participation of women in the work force in domestic piecework, temporary work, and subcontracting may further lead to the exploitation of women in Chile. The importance of women in economic development in Chile should be based on building skills, providing support child care services, reorienting women's education, and tax incentives. Chile over the past decade has achieved relatively stable economic growth and increased employment of women. During 1990-93 the growth of women in the work force increased at a rate of 16.8%, while men's presence increased by only 9.8%. The Chilean economy is based on a sophisticated modern sector and a labor-intensive informal sector. The Chilean model of development relies on cheap, flexible labor and a government approval of this model. Increased participation of women in the labor force is usually perceived as increased economic empowerment. A 1994 Oxfam study found that women were being forced into the labor market due to declines in family income and low wages. 46% of men and women received wages that did not cover basic necessities. The Chilean labor market is gender-stratified. Men are paid better than women for the same work. Men are in more permanent positions. Labor laws are either inadequate or violated, particularly for hours of work and overtime pay and conditions of employment and benefits. Traditional female jobs are those that rely on women's natural attributes. These unskilled attributes are rewarded with low wages. Little opportunity is provided for upgrading skills or acquiring new skills. Some women turn down advancement because of a lack of role models. Women have little opportunity to develop their self-image as workers. Poor self-images affect women's work attitudes and motivation. Some firms use competition between women to boost production. Chilean women remain in subordinate roles.     

The Save the Children Fund and the Russian Famine of 1921–23: Claims and Counter‐Claims about Feeding “Bolshevik” Children*

Drawing on literature on the social construction of social problems, this paper examines the British Save the Children Fund's claims making activities regarding support for child famine victims in Russia in 1921–23. It examines 1) how the Fund constructed famine in Russia as a social problem that was worthy of British, and wider international, support and attention; 2) the rhetorical strategies used by the Fund to construct the causes of the famine for the British public; and 3) the claims the Fund made about why Britons should care about starving children in Russia. We also attend to counter‐claims made about the Fund and its involvement with Russia. We used unpublished letters, memos and reports from The Save the Children Fund archives to examine how the Fund responded to attacks on its activities coming from Russian émigrés and from The Daily Express. We suggest that the examination of this case through the concept of claims making offers a lens to understand how children in distress in the early 20^th century became the objects of British, and wider international aid.