A wide range of issues besieges women globally, including economic exploitation, sexist oppression, racial, ethnic, and caste oppression, and cultural imperialism. This book builds a feminist social justice framework from practices of women's activism in India to understand and work to overcome these injustices. The feminist social justice framework provides an alternative to mainstream philosophical frameworks that promote global gender justice: for example, universal human rights, economic projects such as microfinance, and cosmopolitanism. McLaren demonstrates that these frameworks are bound by a commitment to individualism and an abstract sense of universalism that belies their root neo-liberalism. Arguing that these frameworks emphasize individualism over interdependence, similarity over diversity, and individual success over collective capacity, McLaren draws on the work of Rabindranath Tagore to develop the concept of relational cosmopolitanism. Relational cosmopolitanism prioritizes our connections while, crucially, acknowledging the reality of power differences. Extending Iris Young's theory of political responsibility, McLaren shows how Fair Trade connects to the economic solidarity movement. The Self-Employed Women's Association and MarketPlace India empower women through access to livelihoods as well as fostering leadership capabilities that allow them to challenge structural injustice through political and social activism. Their struggles to resist economic exploitation and gender oppression through collective action show the vital importance of challenging individualist approaches to achieving gender justice. The book is a rallying call for a shift in our thinking and practice towards re-imagining the possibilities for justice from a relational framework, from independence to interdependence, from identity to intersectionality, and from interest to socio-political imagination.

Women's Activism in South Africa provides the most comprehensive collection of women's experiences within civil society since the 1994 transition. This book captures South African women's stories of collective activism and social change at a crucial point for the future of democracy in the country, if not the continent. Pulling together the voices of activists and scholars, South Africa's path to democracy and the assurance of gender rights emerge as a complex journey of both successes and challenges. The collection elucidates a new form of pragmatic feminism, building upon the elasticity between the state and civil society. What the cases demonstrate is that while the state itself may not be a panacea, it still represents a key source of power and the primary locus of vital resources, including the rights of citizenship, access to basic needs, and the promise of protection from gender-based violence - all central to women's particular needs in South Africa.

Women's Activism and Social Change challenges the popular belief that the lives of antebellum women focused on their role in the private sphere of the family. Examining intense and well-documented reform movements in nineteenth-century Rochester, New York, Nancy Hewitt distinguishes three networks of women's activism: women from the wealthiest Rochester families who sought to ameliorate the lives of the poor; those from upwardly mobile families who, influenced by evangelical revivalism, campaigned to eradicate such social ills as slavery, vice, and intemperance; and those who combined limited economic resources with an agrarian Quaker tradition of communalism and religious democracy to advocate full racial and sexual equality.

"This is a very exciting collection that will fill an important gap in what has emerged in comparative studies of women and Latin American democracies. Maier and Lebon provide provocative overview essays, and the chapters trace a range of cases from Argentina and Brazil to Nicaragua and Venezuela, showing how institutions. leaders and culture all shape the opportunities and challenges women face."---Jane Jaquette, editor of Feminist Agendas and Democracy in Latin America --

Through the study of local and global activism, Women, Social Change and Activism: Then and Now engages scholars interested in the artistic, economic, educational, ethical, historical, literary, philosophical, political, psychological, religious, and social dimensions of women’s lives and resistance. Through an interdisciplinary inquiry of past and present dilemmas that women and girls have faced globally, this book offers a variety of insights into multicultural issues even outside of the gender studies field.

This book explores the extent to which women have been initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation in China. The book considers how conceptions of women’s roles have changed as China has moved from state socialism to engagement with capitalist globalization, examines the growth of women’s gender and sexual consciousness and social movements for women’s rights, including for marginalized social and sex/gender grouops, and discusses women’s roles in society-state interactions, including many forms of social activism, cultural events, educational innovations, and more. Overall, the book demonstrates that women have not simply been passive receivers of the consequences of the forces of global capitalism, but that they have had a profound, active impact on social transformation in China.

2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award Recipient Winner of the 2018 Author's Award in scholarly non-fiction, presented by the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Winner, 2020 Kornitzer Book Prize, given by Drew University Examines the oft overlooked role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just barely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of “the suburbs” depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. Johnson’s story is powerful, but she was just one among the many working-class activists integral to the budding days of the civil rights movement. Focusing on the strategies and organizational models church women employed in the fight for social justice, Adams tracks the intersections of politics and religion, race and gender, and place and space in a New York City suburb, a local example that offers new insights on northern racial oppression and civil rights protest. As this book makes clear, religion made a key difference in the lives and activism of ordinary black women who lived, worked, and worshiped on the margin during this tumultuous time.