Women S Place In The Andes

In Women’s Place in the Andes Florence E. Babb draws on four decades of anthropological research to reexamine the complex interworkings of gender, race, and indigeneity in Peru and beyond. She deftly interweaves five new analytical chapters with six of her previously published works that exemplify currents in feminist anthropology and activism. Babb argues that decolonizing feminism and engaging more fully with interlocutors from the South will lead to a deeper understanding of the iconic Andean women who are subjects of both national pride and everyday scorn. This book’s novel approach goes on to set forth a collaborative methodology for rethinking gender and race in the Americas.

Pilar is a capable, energetic merchant in the small, Peruvian highland settlement of Chiuchin. Genovena, an unmarried day laborer in the same town, faces an impoverished old age without children to support her. Carmen is the wife of a prosperous farmer in the agricultural community of Mayobamba, eleven thousand feet above Chiuchin in the Andean sierra. Mariana, a madre soltera—single mother—without a husband or communal land of her own, also resides in Mayobamba. These lives form part of an interlocking network that the authors carefully examine in Women of the Andes. In doing so, they explore the riddle of women’s structural subordination by analyzing the social, political, and economic realities of life in Peru. They examine theoretical explanations of sexual hierarchies against the backdrop of life histories. The result is a study that pinpoints the mechanisms perpetuating sexual repression and traces the impact of social change and national policy on women’s lives.

Annie Smith Peck is one of the most accomplished women of the twentieth century that you have never heard of. Peck was a scholar, educator, writer, lecturer, mountain climber, suffragist, and political activist. She was a feminist and an independent thinker who refused to let gender stereotypes stand in her way. Peck gained fame in 1895 when she first climbed the Matterhorn at the age of forty-five – not for her daring alpine feat, but because she climbed wearing pants. Fifteen years later, she was the first climber ever to conquer Mount Huascarán (21,831 feet) in Peru. In 1911, just before her sixtieth birthday, she entered a race with Hiram Bingham (the model for Indiana Jones) to climb Mount Coropuna. A Woman’s Place Is at the Top: The Biography of Annie Smith Peck is the first full length work about this incredible woman who single-handedly carved her place on the map of mountain climbing and international relations. Peck marched in suffrage parades and became a political speaker and writer before women had the right to vote. She was a propagandist, an expert on North-South American relations, and an author and lecturer contracted to speak as an authority on multinational industry and commerce before anyone had ever thought to appoint a woman as a diplomat. With unprecedented access to Peck’s original letters, artifacts, and ephemera, Hannah Kimberley brings Peck’s entire life to the page for the first time, giving Peck her rightful place in history.

A unique book that offers a new treatment of female empowerment, blending spiritual and physical strength in the tradition of Deepak Chopra's New York Times bestseller, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. It is the first book to combine the best of successful self-esteem books such as Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within and fitness books such as those by Joyce Vedral.

The Two-Headed Household is an ethnographic account of gender relations and intrahousehold decisionmaking as well as a policy-oriented study of gender and development in the indigenous Andean community of Chanchalo, Ecuador. Hamilton’s main argument is that the households in these farming communities are “two-headed.” Men and women participate equally in agricultural production and management, in household decisionmaking, and share in the reproductive tasks of child care, food preparation, and other chores. Based on qualitative fieldwork and regional household survey data, this book investigates the effect on women's lives of gender bias in agricultural development programs and labor and commodities markets. Despite household economic reliance on these programs and markets, there is extraordinary evidence of social and economic gender equality. Traditional Andean kinship structures enable women and men to enter marriage as materially equal partners. As seen in case studies of five women and their families, the author continually encounters joint decisionmaking and shared household and agricultural responsibilities. In fact, it often seems that women have the final say in many decisions. There is the belief that a dynamic balance of power between male and female heads provides an impetus toward mutually desired economic and social goals. Despite the strong influence of the patriarchal power of the hacienda system, Andean gender ideology accords women and men equal measures of physical, mental, and emotional fortitude. The belief that maintaining traditional forms of economic collaboration helped them survive on the hacienda was reinforced under the economic and political domination of the patriarchal systems of the landed elite, church, and state. Today, these people are proud of their strong women, strong families, and community solidarity which they believe distinguishes them from Ecuadorean and American societies. Hamilton suggests that women in developing countries should not be viewed as simply, or even inevitably, victims of gender-biased structural or cultural institutions. They may resist male bias, perhaps even with the support of local-level institutions. The Two-Headed Household demonstrates that analysis of gender relations should focus on forms of cooperation among women and men, as well as on forms of conflict, and will be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, gender and development, and Latin American Studies.

South American women authors look at the female experience.

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.

Capturing the intricacies of health practice within the fascinating context of Andean social history, cultural tradition, community and folklore, this is a remarkable and intimate chronicle of Andean culture and everyday life.