Economic history is well documented in Assyriology, thanks to the preservation of dozens of thousands of clay tablets recording administrative operations, contracts and acts dealing with family law. Despite these voluminous sources, the topic of work and the contribution of women have rarely been addressed. This book examines occupations involving women over the course of three millennia of Near Eastern history. It presents the various aspects of women as economic agents inside and outside of the family structure. Inside the family, women were the main actors in the production of goods necessary for everyday life. In some instances, their activities exceeded the simple needs of the household and were integrated within the production of large organizations or commercial channels. The contributions presented in this volume are representative enough to address issues in various domains: social, economic, religious, etc., from varied points of view: archaeological, historical, sociological, anthropological, and with a gender perspective. This book will be a useful tool for historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and graduate students interested in the economy of the ancient Near East and in women and gender studies.

First Published in 2007. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Women in the Ancient Near East offers a lucid account of the daily life of women in Mesopotamia from the third millennium BCE until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. The book systematically presents the lives of women emerging from the available cuneiform material and discusses modern scholarly opinion. Stol’s book is the first full-scale treatment of the history of women in the Ancient Near East.

Trade can dramatically improve women’s lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women’s bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is essential to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate, evidence-based policies to ensure that trade helps to enhance opportunities for all. Research on gender equality and trade has been constrained by limited data and a lack of understanding of the connections among the economic roles that women play as workers, consumers, and decision makers. Building on new analyses and new sex-disaggregated data, Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality aims to advance the understanding of the relationship between trade and gender equality and to identify a series of opportunities through which trade can improve the lives of women.

In the early 2000s, Liberian women wearing wrap skirts and white T-shirts, shouting: ‘We want peace, no more war’, attracted international attention. After almost fifteen years of civil war, the enduring active, multifaceted, and non-violent campaigning for peace by women’s organisations contributed to the end of the fighting and the signing of a peace agreement between the warring factions. Although it is widely assumed that women’s inclusion in peace processes yields greater attention to women’s issues and needs in the aftermath of a conflict, this is only partly the case in Liberia. Thus, this analysis looks beyond the extraordinary commitment by women in Liberia and deals with the questions to what extent their role in the peace process has contributed to gender-sensitive outcomes in post-conflict Liberian society and why greater gender sensitivity was not achieved. By focusing on manifestations of patterns of masculinity in the public and private spheres, Anne Theobald identifies factors at different levels of analysis within different time frames that elucidate the unexpected outcome. Not only does this provide for a more encompassing understanding of dynamics of gender relations and context-specific variables impeding gender sensitivity in post-conflict settings, but it also helps to refine prevailing theoretical approaches on gender in peacemaking and peacebuilding and to develop more holistic, context-specific, and efficient policy approaches, which can effectively lead to gender-sensitive peace.

This is the first book to systematically track postwar changes in family formation in Western Europe and the United States. Cohabitation and motherhood outside of marriage have become more widespread at the same time that women’s social roles are evolving. Women are attaining higher levels of education, marrying at an older age, more frequently working outside the home, and have more reproductive freedom due to new advances in contraception. In this original collection of essays, sociologists and demographers from eight Western European countries and the United States use longitudinal data to compare national variations and explain the connection between the new role of women and family formation in postwar society. The contributors provide a thorough review of the social demographic literature to advance a variety of hypotheses about the relationships between changing women’s education and family formation outcomes, which are empirically examined and compared across countries.

Titles in this series help students to develop the skills they need to research history topics successfully. Each title shows students how to evaluate, organize and use information and primary sources. How to cite sources and plagiarism are also covered.