Synopses & Reviews
The Future of Women's Rights identifies the emergence of various trends threatening the advance of gender equality, women's human rights and sustainable human development. These phenomena include the impacts of globalization and neoliberal economics, developments in biotechnology, the neo-conservative backlash against women's rights, monopolistic ownership patterns over information technologies, the rise of identity politics marginalizing women's issues, and the increase in violent conflict and war. The contributors to this volume are united in seeing a pressing need for women's movements to evaluate their methods, with a view to making their future political work more effective. They identify current issues and trends in the world, thinking through how these may impact women and the work of women's movements.
Synopsis
The remarkable array of women's activists and leaders from different parts of the world assembled for the dialogue in this volume are deeply concerned at the recent emergence of various trends that may threaten the ongoing work of women's movements in advancing gender equality, women's human rights and sustainable human development. These phenomena include the multifarious impacts of globalization and neoliberal economics, developments in biotechnology, the neo-conservative backlash against women's rights, monopolistic ownership patterns over information technologies that exclude women, fundamentalisms of various kinds and the rise of identity politics that subordinate or marginalize women's issues, and the increase in violent conflict and war.
The contributors to this volume are united in seeing a pressing need for women's movements to evaluate the methods they have used until now, with a view to making their political work more effective in future. They try to identify current issues and trends in the world. They think through how these may impact on women and the work of women's movements. And they identify how women should prepare for them, and what strategies they should prioritise, in order to protect and advance their agenda.
With as deliberately diverse a group of women thinkers as this, there is inevitably a thought-provokingly diverse range of views about how women ought to respond if they not be pushed on to the defensive, but instead take the initiative again and be more proactive across the wide range of arenas and issues that bear particularly on one-half of humanity.
About the Author
Joanna Kerr is Executive Director of the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID).
Ellen Sprenger is Executive Director of Mama Cash, a women's fund based in The Netherlands.
Alison Symington is Senior Researcher at AWID.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: the future of women’s rights
Alison Symington and Ellen Sprenger
2. From ‘opposing’ to ‘proposing’: finding proactive global strategies for feminist futures
Joanna Kerr
3. Creating a new world with new visions: African feminism and trends in the global women’s movement
Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi
4. Rights of passage: women shaping the twenty-first century
Mahnaz Afkhami
5. Challenging power: alternatives to the current global order
An interview with Josefa (Gigi) Francisco
6. An action framework for South Asia
Deepa Dhanraj, Geetanjali Misra, and Srilatha Batliwala
7. Different worlds possible: feminist yearnings for shared futures
Sarah Bracke
8. Diversity as our strength: transforming power, public policy and popular culture
Ana Criquillion
9. Confronting globalization: feminist political spirituality as a strategy of action
Alda Facio
10. Globalization and reinventing the politics of a women’s movement
Vanessa Griffen
11. Caution! women moving: strategies for organizing feminist visions of the future
Sisonke Msimang
12. International and post-socialist women’s rights advocacy: points of convergence and tension
Reflections from Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck
13. Gender equality advocates speak: feminist issues and strategies in the future
Rhonda Leeson
Editors and contributors
Index