Proposals For The Feminine Economy

Transmuting the tensions between feminism and Capitalism, Proposals for the Feminine Economy gives us a roadmap forward, insisting that business can be a site of feminist practice if we embody our values, create new economies, and experiment with redistributions of power & resources. Practical and poetic prescriptions for feminism’s fourth wave.

A holistic vision for a new economic paradigm, founded in feminine and feminist principles. Transmuting the tensions between feminism and Capitalism, Proposals for the Feminine Economy gives us a roadmap forward by insisting that business can be a site of feminist practice if we embody our values, create new economies, and experiment with redistributions of power & resources. Practical, poetic prescriptions for feminism's fourth wave.

Feminism in Practice uses feminism as a blueprint for exploring change strategies. It features twenty contemporary feminists from diverse arenas, including activists, comedians, musicians, politicians, poets, and showrunners. The women come to life through line drawings, brief biographies, extensive quotations, their definitions of feminism, and the change strategies they employ. Questions for reflection encourage readers to think through their own relationship to feminism and change. Chapter 1 defines feminism, raising issues with the typical definition of feminism as the effort to achieve equality between women and men. It concludes with a description of over twenty types of feminism. Chapter 2 describes the triggering events, happening places, and key ideas of the four waves of feminism. The opening chapters provide a comprehensive understanding of the diversity and complexity of feminist movement. The book is organized around five primary objectives that animate contemporary change efforts—proclaiming identity, naming a problem, enriching a system, changing a system, and creating an alternative system. Each objective is developed through theoretical assumptions and twelve change strategies that show it at work in feminist movement. Feminism in Practice also serves as a practical handbook that readers can use to experiment with the strategies and expand their toolkits for creating change in their lives and worlds. The authors are uniquely qualified to explore issues of feminism and change. Karen Foss and Sonja Foss are second wave feminists who have written extensively on alternative change strategies, feminist communication, and feminist theory. Alena Ruggerio brings to the project the standpoint of a third wave feminist at home in pop culture. Her scholarship lies at the intersection of rhetoric, feminism, and religious studies. To learn more about Feminism in Practice, listen to the authors’ October 2021 interview on The Jefferson Exchange.

Explores certain textual representations of gift economies, contrasts them with the dominant market paradigm, investigates the values of a utopic horizon of gift exchange, and analyzes how the representation of the sexual or racial Other as economically the same or different can have a repressive force. Highlights two historical moments: the 18th-century transition from feudalism to the capitalist and colonial market economy, particularly in the work of Rousseau; and the purported transition to a post-capitalist and post-colonial economy in the late 20th century, as represented in the works of Cixous, Derrida, and Irigaray. Distributed in the US by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Since the early 1980s Ecuador has experienced a series of events unparalleled in its history. Its &“free market&” strategies exacerbated the debt crisis, and in response new forms of social movement organizing arose among the country&’s poor, including women&’s groups. Gendered Paradoxes focuses on women&’s participation in the political and economic restructuring process of the past twenty-five years, showing how in their daily struggle for survival Ecuadorian women have both reinforced and embraced the neoliberal model yet also challenged its exclusionary nature. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork and employing an approach combining political economy and cultural politics, Amy Lind charts the growth of several strands of women&’s activism and identifies how they have helped redefine, often in contradictory ways, the real and imagined boundaries of neoliberal development discourse and practice. In her analysis of this ambivalent and &“unfinished&” cultural project of modernity in the Andes, she examines state policies and their effects on women of various social sectors; women&’s community development initiatives and responses to the debt crisis; and the roles played by feminist &“issue networks&” in reshaping national and international policy agendas in Ecuador and in developing a transnationally influenced, locally based feminist movement.

A handbook for business beginners. Outlines the four sequential stages of business gestation, drawing parallels to the phases of fetal development and provides a feminine-ist framework for entrepreneurship.

We hear much talk about “family values,” but what “value” do we actually place on the family itself? In Postindustrial America is the family merely a moral and sentimental “worthy cause?” Or is it in fact the focus of some of society's most important work—the development of productive workers and citizens—and thus one of the primary engines of economic growth?In The Feminine Economy and Economic Man, Shirley Burggraf sets the record straight about the true value—and true cost—of the family's work in nurturing and protecting society's “human capital.” With startling insight she also shows why we must replace our “charity” attitude toward family with something more appropriate, the same model we use for encouraging other, important economic entities—the model of investment and incentives.Economists have always referred to an inevitable “next generation” of workers who will expand the GNP, pay off the national debt, and support the social security system. Yet until now economic thinkers, predominantly male, have never factored into their equations the investment in time, labor, and opportunity cost actually required to rear those children into productive maturity. It was as if the next generation arose magically on its own when, in fact, the economically important work of caretaking was being performed all the while by an invisible, unpaid labor force called women.But now, with expanded opportunities available, women no longer volunteer to nurture and educate the young, or to take care of the sick and dying, for submarket wages or for no wages at all. A huge transfer of labor has taken place from the Feminine Economy of caregiving into the market-driven world of Economic Man, but economists, persisting in their blind spot, have yet to recognize the full impact of the shift. Thirty years after this free or underpriced labor force began to disappear we see our social structure fraying at the seams, and we wonder why.The answer, clearly, is not to send women back home, nor is it for paternalistic government to try to displace the family entirely and take over every caretaking function. The answer is insightful public policy that insures that those who invest most in producing our economy's human capital—the parents, the teachers, the caregivers—be rewarded with real economic incentives rather than lip service and platitudes.A parent's dividend through social security, dramatic revision of our divorce laws, and a parent-driven approach to public education are just a few of the provocative ideas Shirley Burggraf offers for bringing the family back into the center of this vital economic function. Both in its analysis and in its recommendations, this is a book certain to spark heated debate.