Female Agency in the Urban Economy

Female Agency in the Urban Economy
Title Female Agency in the Urban Economy PDF eBook
Author Deborah Simonton
Publisher Routledge
Pages 321
Release 2013-04-17
Genre History
ISBN 1136275029

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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.

Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640-1830

Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640-1830
Title Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640-1830 PDF eBook
Author
Publisher
Pages 271
Release 2015
Genre
ISBN

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Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa

Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa
Title Women and the Informal Economy in Urban Africa PDF eBook
Author Mary Njeri Kinyanjui
Publisher Zed Books Ltd.
Pages 224
Release 2014-06-12
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1780326335

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In this highly original work, Mary Njeri Kinyanjui explores the trajectory of women's movement from the margins of urbanization into the centres of business activities in Nairobi and its accompanying implications for urban planning. While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre. Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.

On Norms and Agency

On Norms and Agency
Title On Norms and Agency PDF eBook
Author Ana María Muñoz Boudet
Publisher World Bank Publications
Pages 231
Release 2013-04-25
Genre Social Science
ISBN 082139892X

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Based on focus groups and interviews with nearly 4,000 women, men, girls, and boys from 20 countries, this book explores areas that are less often studied in gender and development: gender norms and agency. It reveals how little gender norms have changed, how similar they are across countries, and how they are being challenged and contested.

Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920

Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920
Title Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648-1920 PDF eBook
Author Deborah Simonton
Publisher Taylor & Francis
Pages 268
Release 2016-10-04
Genre History
ISBN 1315522802

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As Enlightenment notions of predictability, progress and the sense that humans could control and shape their environments informed European thought, catastrophes shook many towns to the core, challenging the new world view with dramatic impact. This book concentrates on a period marked by passage from a society of scarcity to one of expenditure and accumulation, from ranks and orders to greater social mobility, from traditional village life to new bourgeois and even individualistic urbanism. The volume employs a broad definition of catastrophe, as it examines how urban communities conceived, adapted to, and were transformed by catastrophes, both natural and human-made. Competing views of gender figure in the telling and retelling of these analyses: women as scapegoats, as vulnerable, as victims, even as cannibals or conversely as defenders, organizers of assistance, inspirers of men; and men in varied guises as protectors, governors and police, heroes, leaders, negotiators and honorable men. Gender is also deployed linguistically to feminize activities or even countries. Inevitably, however, these tragedies are mediated by myth and memory. They are not neutral events whose retelling is a simple narrative. Through a varied array of urban catastrophes, this book is a nuanced account that physically and metaphorically maps men and women into the urban landscape and the worlds of catastrophe.

Single Life and the City 1200-1900

Single Life and the City 1200-1900
Title Single Life and the City 1200-1900 PDF eBook
Author Isabelle Devos
Publisher Springer
Pages 272
Release 2015-07-23
Genre Social Science
ISBN 1137406402

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By taking on a long-term perspective, a large geographical scope and moving beyond the homogeneous treatment of single people, this book fleshes out the particularities of urban singles and allows for a better understanding of the attitudes and values underlying this lifestyle in the European past.

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe

Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe
Title Women’s Work and Rights in Early Modern Urban Europe PDF eBook
Author Anna Bellavitis
Publisher Springer
Pages 270
Release 2018-10-09
Genre Business & Economics
ISBN 3319965417

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In the last decades, women’s role in the workforce has dramatically changed, though gender inequality persists and for women, gender identity still prevails over work identity. It is important not to forget or diminish the historical role of women in the labour market though and this book proposes a critical overview of the most recent historical research on women’s roles in economic urban activities. Covering a wide area of early modern Europe, from Portugal to Poland and from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, Bellavitis presents an overview of the economic rights of women – property, inheritance, management of their wealth, access to the guilds, access to education – and assesses the evolution of female work in different urban contexts.