Women Power And Property

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.

Arguing that property and power are central to understanding the position of women in farming and using comparative examples, this book considers the transfer of land between men, the changed role of women in the dairy industry in the nineteenth century, women in farming organisations, women in agricultural education programmes, and the role of the state in shaping the lives of farm women. The common themes of power and property underpin all the chapters.

The expansion of married women's property rights was a main achievement of the first wave of feminism in Latin America. As Carmen Diana Deeere and Magdalena Leon reveal, however, the disjuncture between rights and actual ownership remains vast. This is particularly true in rural areas, where the distribution of land between men and women is highly unequal. In their pioneering, twelve-country comparative study, the authors argue that property ownership is directly related to women's bargaining power within the household and community, point out changes resulting from recent gender-progressive legislation, and identify additional areas for future reform, including inheritance rights of wives.

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.

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."

Andrew Riggsby provides a survey of the main areas of Roman law, and their place in Roman life.

From Award-winning Property Developer and Mentor Bindar Dosanjh, this book is for any woman who wants to control their financial future. There is a property investing strategy for everyone regardless of financial or personal circumstances. Bindar teaches a safe and secure way to start property investing.