Women Analysis

This collection explores the housing circumstances of women in developed and emerging societies in Europe, USA and East Asia, at a time of substantial economic and social change. Its focus is on the interface between housing and gender and how this socially constructed relationship manifests and transforms over time and space.

This report presents a description of the patterns of change in rural women's reproductive behaviour in South Africa over a period of 17 years extending from 1987-9 to 2004. The analyses were informed by the Programme of Action that was set out at the 1994 International Cairo Conference on Population and Development. The Programme of Action has a 20-year implementation time period, and the year 2004 was halfway through the 20 years. The year 2004 is also 30 years since the introduction of South Africa's National Family Planning Programme in 1975, which advanced the health rationale for fertility regulation. It is also twenty years after the introduction of the Population Development Programme in 1985, which emphasized the demographic rationale for fertility regulation. It is finally the seventh year after the introduction of the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act in 1997, which legalized pregnancy terminations under prescribed conditions, with emphasis on women's rights to choice. Five of South Africa's nine provinces, which have more than 50 per cent of their populations living in tribal areas, were included in the analyses.

An updated edition of the Sunday Times Bestseller Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. A year on since the advent of #metoo, Beard looks at how the discussions have moved on during this time, and how that intersects with issues of rape and consent, and the stories men tell themselves to support their actions. In trademark Beardian style, using examples ancient and modern, Beard argues, 'it's time for change - and now!' From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

This study analyses the exceptional narratives of five South Asian women writers who uncover hidden manifestations of male violence against women. Their vehement struggle for the attention on gender-based violence is transferred into literary representations that give the impression of an avalanche of feelings impatiently waiting to be transformed into words after a long-endured silence. In analysing the possibilities and consequences of disrupting the silence on male violence, this study discusses the costs and the chances of success of such a non-conformist endeavour.