The authors highlight how structural circumstances in countries with various degrees of industrialization are associated with specific policies. The analyses of women’s experiences reveal the variety of ways in which private patriarchy in families combines with public patriarchy in economies and states to create a system of domination which subordinates women. The authors detail how gender is constructed under specific political, economic, and cultural circumstances, and seek to understand how state policies with differing sensitivities to women’s issues have produced mixed outcomes for women and their families in the process of economic development.

In this book, the author builds on decades of complex research to examine the gender pay gap and the unequal distribution of labor between couples in the home. The author argues that although public and private discourse has brought these concerns to light, the actions taken - such as a single company slapped on the wrist or a few progressive leaders going on paternity leave - are the economic equivalent of tossing a band-aid to someone with cancer. These solutions, the author writes, treat the symptoms and not the disease of gender inequality in the workplace and economy. Here, the author points to data that reveals how the pay gap widens further down the line in women's careers, about 10 to 15 years out, as opposed to those beginning careers after college. She examines five distinct groups of women over the course of the twentieth century: cohorts of women who differ in terms of career, job, marriage, and children, in approximated years of graduation - 1900s, 1920s, 1950s, 1970s, and 1990s - based on various demographic, labor force, and occupational outcomes. The book argues that our entire economy is trapped in an old way of doing business; work structures have not adapted as more women enter the workforce. Gender equality in pay and equity in home and childcare labor are flip sides of the same issue, and the author frames both in the context of a serious empirical exploration that has not yet been put in a long-run historical context. This book offers a deep look into census data, rich information about individual college graduates over their lifetimes, and various records and sources of material to offer a new model to restructure the home and school systems that contribute to the gender pay gap and the quest for both family and career. --

Despite the pervasive changes that have taken place in women’s lives in the past twenty-five years--increased participation in the labor force, the attainment of higher levels of education, and higher salaries--comparable changes in the division of family labor and in the roles of men have lagged considerably. In this timely book, the editors and other experts in feminism and family studies examine the effects of two decades of influence by the women’s movement on sex roles and child rearing. While applauding some positive changes, the contributors point to powerful forces of resistance to equality between the sexes, especially “the question of family”--the fear of depriving children of maternal attachment and the belief that working mothers are placing their own interests above those of other family members--as an issue that, until fully addressed, prevents genuine equality between the sexes.

Shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2016. In the wake of resettlement from the desert to the hills overlooking Jerusalem, aging Bedouin patriarch Mannan wants his son Muhammad al-Asghar (the Youngest) to take on leadership and hold the clan together. But the youngest of eighteen sons is unable to follow in his father’s footsteps. Like others in the al-Abd al-Lat clan, he is torn between old customs and new choices. Muhammad al-Asghar is married—with affection and loyalty—to open-minded Sanaa, a childless divorcee. He works as a clerk in a sharia court, recording marriage contracts and divorce papers. But he wants to become a writer and gets drawn into stories: of his mate, of unhappy co-wives in the sharia court, of his storytelling mother Wadha (his father’s sixth wife), of his brothers and relatives. Listening to them, he becomes aware of the impossibility of equality for women in a clan culture caught in the grip of a suffocating foreign occupation, following the Palestinian exodus of 1948. And while he fails to bring the clan together, as his father had hoped, he manages to honor Mannan’s legacy request and record the life of the clan. A family album imbued with disaster, warmth and humor, Praise for the Women of the Family captures vivid snapshots of shifting intimate bonds, taken in the shadow of the patriarch by a youngest son, in search of his ­people’s story. The Al-Abd al-Lat clan has left the desert and is preparing to leave its Bedouin customs behind. Some of the women of the clan are drawn to the allure of modern life, while others scorn it and fear the loss of their traditional lifestyle and values. When Rasmia accompanies her husband to a party, Najma wears a dress and Sana gets a tan on her white legs, they set malicious tongues wagging. Meanwhile, Wadha, the sixth wife of Mannan, the chief of the clan, still believes that the washing machine and television are inhabited by evil spirits. Set in the tumultuous time after the nakba (the Palestinian exodus from what is now Israel), Praise for the Women in the Family portrays the rapid advance of modernity and the growing conflict in 1950s Palestine. It also reveals the impossibility of political equality in a society that treats its women unjustly and denies them the right to dignity and equality with men.

Kay Ann Johnson provides much-needed information about women and gender equality under Communist leadership. She contends that, although the Chinese Communist Party has always ostensibly favored women's rights and family reform, it has rarely pushed for such reforms. In reality, its policies often have reinforced the traditional role of women to further the Party's predominant economic and military aims. Johnson's primary focus is on reforms of marriage and family because traditional marriage, family, and kinship practices have had the greatest influence in defining and shaping women's place in Chinese society. Conversant with current theory in political science, anthropology, and Marxist and feminist analysis, Johnson writes with clarity and discernment free of dogma. Her discussions of family reform ultimately provide insights into the Chinese government's concern with decreasing the national birth rate, which has become a top priority. Johnson's predictions of a coming crisis in population control are borne out by the recent increase in female infanticide and the government abortion campaign.

Women, Work and Family is a classic of women's history and is still the only text on the history of women's work in England and France, providing an excellent introduction to the changing status of women from 1750 to the present.