Study with reference to Orissa, India.

What can we learn about the Chinese revolution by placing a doubly marginalized group—rural women—at the center of the inquiry? In this book, Gail Hershatter explores changes in the lives of seventy-two elderly women in rural Shaanxi province during the revolutionary decades of the 1950s and 1960s. Interweaving these women’s life histories with insightful analysis, Hershatter shows how Party-state policy became local and personal, and how it affected women’s agricultural work, domestic routines, activism, marriage, childbirth, and parenting—even their notions of virtue and respectability. The women narrate their pasts from the vantage point of the present and highlight their enduring virtues, important achievements, and most deeply harbored grievances. In showing what memories can tell us about gender as an axis of power, difference, and collectivity in 1950s rural China and the present, Hershatter powerfully examines the nature of socialism and how gender figured in its creation.

Building on their analysis in Sociology in Government (Penn State, 2003), Julie Zimmerman and Olaf Larson again join forces across the generations to explore the unexpected inclusion of rural and farm women in the research conducted by the USDA’s Division of Farm Population and Rural Life. Existing from 1919 to 1953, the Division was the first, and for a time the only, unit of the federal government devoted to sociological research. The authors explore how these early rural sociologists found the conceptual space to include women in their analyses of farm living, rural community social organization, and the agricultural labor force.

Trained in India and at Johns Hopkins University where she and her husband, Dr Ajay Bang, learnt public health and research methodologies, the couple returned to India to set up a health clinic in Maharashtras neglected Gadchiroli district, about 170 km from Nagpur, where the Gonds are the dominant tribal group. As co-author Rupa Chinai points out, this is a very old centre of settlement of about 3000 years, from here stretches eastwards the tribal crescent that arcs across Central India and encompasses the ancient Dandakaranya forest. Dr Rani Bangs research found that 92 percent of women in this region had no access to treatment for gynaecological disorders in the absence of women doctors. Such neglect is accompanied by globalisation and liberalisation which adds further stresses: rural families are unprepared for the rapid changes wrought in the spheres of education, information, material enhancement and changes in lifestyle. All of this has an impact on human relationships and health. In his foreword, Rahul Goswami points out that the book plays many roles. It is a commentary on the chronic myopia of a planning process that refuses to see millions of Indians and the ways in which their lives can be bettered. It reveals the way tribal society is being buffeted by the modern and whose traditional kinship and ecological systems are being sorely stressed. It is also a logbook of case medicine. Quite different from the revolutionary activity of the Far Left, the Bangs have set in motion a type of revolution that equips women and men, communities and administrators with the tools to build an indigenous expression of development, one in which the fundamentals of healthcare, interdependence and sustainable economics are paramount.

IFPRI’s flagship report reviews the major food policy issues, developments, and decisions of 2018, and considers challenges and opportunities for 2019. This year’s Global Food Policy Report highlights the urgency of rural revitalization to address a growing crisis in rural areas. Rural people around the world continue to struggle with food insecurity, persistent poverty and inequality, and environmental degradation. Policies, institutions, and investments that take advantage of new opportunities and technologies, increase access to basic services, create more and better rural jobs, foster gender equality, and restore the environment can make rural areas vibrant and healthy places to live and work. Drawing on recent findings, IFPRI researchers and other distinguished food policy experts consider critical aspects of rural revitalization.

Women in contemporary Greek society have been conventionally depicted as oppressed and socially inferior, circumscribed in behavior and segregated from the world of men. In 1967 Ernestine Friedl's classic article, "The Position of Women: Appearnce and Reality," argued that this view was overly simplified and that in Greek villages women in fact exercise power in household decisions and in determining the economic and marital future of their children. Since that article, feminists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the appearances of prestige vs. the realities of power. In this volume scholars form a variety of backgrounds return the debate to the setting of Greece for the first time since Friedl's work. Introduced by Jill Dubisch, the book contains eight original essays and a republication of the Friedl article. Among other topics, the essays examine changes now occurring in Greek gender roles, the ways women deal with oppression and act as mediators between the domestic sphere and life outside the home, and the extension of the language and symbolism of gender beyond male and female roles. The contributors are Juliet du Boulay, Anna Caraveli, Muriel Dimen, Jill Dubisch, Michael Herzfeld, Robinette Kennedy, Elftherios Pavlides and Jana Hesser, and S.D. Salamone and J.B. Stanton. Jill Dubisch is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Originally published in 1994, this book brings together papers developing feminist analyses of the rural condition from a wide range of industrialised countries, informed by the national and local cultural constructions of gender and rurality which they interpret. The chapters address the gendered power relations of rural households and agricultural science; women’s mobilisation in farming and environmental politics; the intersection of domestic and rural values and practices as they shape gender identities.