Property Women And Politics

Although many feminist authors have pointed out the ways in which women have been property, they have been less successful in suggesting how women might become the subjects rather than the objects of property holding. Property, Women, and Politics draws on a series of historical and anthropological studies which include the property position of women in classical Greece, the Anglo-American doctrine of coverture, nineteenth-century prostitution, and structural adjustment programs in sub-Saharan Africa; and it includes a comprehensive critique of the treatment of property by both mainstream political theorists and important second-wave feminists. While most canonical theories of property are guilty of excluding the experience and condition of women, thereby ruling out full subjecthood for them, Donna Dickenson argues that the relationship between holding property and becoming a subject is not sex-specific. Property, Women, and Politics deconstructs and contests the concept of property. It also uses important insights in recent feminist thought to suggest productive directions for a reconstructed theory of property, one in which women's work counts. The reconstructed model is applied to such pressing areas of medical ethics as egg and sperm donation, contract motherhood, abortion, and the sale of fetal tissue. It also shows how we can radically revise our assumptions about the "marriage contract."

Cutting-edge research from India finds bargaining power predicts whether electoral quotas can empower women to upend economic inequality.

First published in 1984, Women and Property studies the idea of wealth and property in relation to women in diverse countries. It attempts a definition of the term 'property' itself and goes on to look at the relationships and rights associated with these various kinds of property. The authors assess the effects of wider economic forces and State intervention, indicating the changing contexts in which these systems are set today. In some cases, life-cycle markers such as marriage, divorce and widowhood are critical, and in many cases, it is the organisation of the household, residential patterns and kinship rights which are seen to structure the relationships of women, men and property. Ideological constructs regarding female sexuality, and also those in which women and children may be conceptualised as 'objects' are considered in detail. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the significance of property as a critical factor affecting the position of women in society, and the original papers presented here provide new dimensions for a neglected area of feminist debate. This book will be of interest to students of sociology, political science, law and gender studies.

Now in paperback, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon’s classic study, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right (1976). It is the only book to cover the entire history of the intense controversies about reproductive rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years. Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women’s status, Gordon shows how opposition to it has long been part of the entrenched opposition to gender equality.

Legal scholars, economists, and international development practitioners often assume that the state is capable of 'securing' rights to land and addressing gender inequality in land tenure. In this innovative study of land tenure in Solomon Islands, Rebecca Monson challenges these assumptions. Monson demonstrates that territorial disputes have given rise to a legal system characterised by state law, custom, and Christianity, and that the legal construction and regulation of property has, in fact, deepened gender inequalities and other forms of social difference. These processes have concentrated formal land control in the hands of a small number of men leaders, and reproduced the state as a hypermasculine domain, with significant implications for public authority, political participation, and state formation. Drawing insights from legal scholarship and political ecology in particular, this book offers a significant study of gender and legal pluralism in the Pacific, illuminating ongoing global debates about gender inequality, land tenure, ethnoterritorial struggles and the post colonial state.

Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books for 2004The only book to cover the entire history of birth control and the intense controversies about reproduction rights that have raged in the United States for more than 150 years, The Moral Property of Women is a thoroughly updated and revised version of the award-winning historian Linda Gordon's classic history Woman's Body, Woman's Right, originally published in 1976.Arguing that reproduction control has always been central to women's status, The Moral Property of Women shows how opposition to it has long been part of the conservative opposition to gender equality. From its roots in folk medicine and in a campaign so broad it constituted a grassroots social movement at some points in history, to its legitimization through public policy, the widespread acceptance of birth control has involved a major reorientation of sexual values. Gordon puts today's reproduction control controversies--foreign aid for family planning, the abortion debates, teenage pregnancy and childbearing, stem-cell research--into historical perspective and shows how the campaign to legalize abortion is part of a 150-year-old struggle over reproductive rights, a struggle that has followed a circuitous path. Beginning with the "folk medicine" of birth control, Gordon discusses how the backlash against the first women's rights movement of the 1800s prohibited both abortion and contraception about 130 years ago. She traces the campaign for legal reproduction control from the 1870s to the present and argues that attitudes toward birth control have been inseparable from family values, especially standards about sexuality and gender equality. Highlighting both leaders and followers in the struggle, The Moral Property of Women chronicles the contributions of well-known reproduction control pioneers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Emma Goldman, as well as lesser- known campaigners including the utopian socialist Robert Dale Owen, the three doctors Foote--Edward Bliss Foote, Edward Bond Foote, and Mary Bond Foote--the civil libertarian Mary Ware Dennett, and the daring Jane project of the 1970s, in which Chicago women's liberation activists performed illegal abortions.

By 1850, most contraceptive methods and abortion were illegal in America. But in the late 19th century, American women began demanding the right to prevent or terminate pregnancy. Gordon traces the story of this controversy, and includes new material on recent movements to outlaw abortion.

An analysis of gender and property throughout South Asia which argues that the most important economic factor affecting women is the gender gap in command over property.