From Patriarchy to Empowerment
Women’s Participation, Movements, and Rights in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia

Paper $45.00s    |    978-0-8156-3111-8    |    2007

Explores profound economic and cultural changes for women in "the patriarchal belt" of the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia.

Reviews
"This collection is extremely diverse in focus, discipline, and level. Skillful editing by Moghadam has done as much as possible to create bridges among the separate papers, but there is an irreducible gap between chapters that, on the one side, deal with feminist politics as such, and those on the other side that offer locality-specific analyses of aspects of women’s lives or literature. Although many individual articles are well written, the general theme of empowerment does not serve to create a united framework that would make the collection as a whole useful in the classroom. But individual chapters offer a wealth of idiosyncratic detail on diverse aspects of women's lives, and have much to recommend them as a library resource for particular research projects. Recommended."
—Choice

Description
This rich anthology offers twenty studies on instances of emerging social justice and women’s empowerment in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. These areas are home to large populations where women’s rights have withered under patriarchal rule, and many are beset by civic unrest.

The book shows how changes are occurring as flood tides of capital, people, and information erode entrenched gender regimes, giving birth to energetic and forward-thinking women’s movements. Highly original, conceptually sophisticated, and eminently readable, this book illustrates how local women are transforming their collective fates by questioning their status, forming alliances, demanding full participation in economic development and the political process, and mining the opportunities afforded by globalization.

Editor
Valentine M. Moghadam is professor of sociology and women’s studies and director of the women’s studies program at Purdue University. She is the author of several books including Modernizing Women: Gender and Social Change in the Middle East.

7 x 10, 384 pages, 1 map, 9 tables, bibliography, index