This unique and groundbreaking book seeks to re-focus gender debate onto the issue of daughter discrimination - a phenomenon still hidden and unacknowledged across the world. It asks the controversial question of why millions of girls do not appear to be surviving to adulthood in contemporary Asia. In the first major study available of this emotive and sensitive issue, Elisabeth Croll investigates the extent of discrimination against female children in Asia and shifts the focus of attention firmly from son-preference to daughter-discrimination. This book brings together demographic data and anthropological field studies to reveal the multiple ways in which girls are disadvantaged, from excessive child mortality to the withholding of health care and education on the basis of gender. Focusing especially on China and India, the book reveals the surprising coincidence of increasing daughter discrimination with rising economic development, declining fertility and the generally improved status of women in East and South Asia. Essential reading for all those interested in gender in contemporary society.

Profiles the life and kitchen recipes of 16 women leaders from 10 Asean countries.These include Madam Bun Rany Hun Sen, the president of the Cambodian Red Cross and wife of Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen; Madam Ha Thi Kiet, president of the Vietnamese Women's Union and deputy to the Vietnam National Assembly; Senator Teresa Aquino-Oreta of The Philippines; Malaysia's Minister for Women and Family Development Datuk Shahrizat Abdul Jalil as well as Singapore's First Lady, Mrs Urmila Nathan.

This book provides a compelling narrative history of the experiences and achievements of female British missionaries in China, India, and Africa during the 19th century and first half of the 20th century—the first such account available. Despite the fact that by the early 20th century female missionaries began to outnumber their male counterparts, there are few publications that document the contributions of women to the missionary movement against a backdrop of civil unrest, famine, and war. Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in Asia provides accurate and insightful information to rectify this glaring omission. In this book, author Rosemary Seton draws upon memoirs, letters, diaries, and mission records to create a unique and fascinating history of the British women whose sense of vocation took them to the East. As most British missionary women of this period were Anglicans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists, the focus is upon Protestant missionaries; Catholics are also included, however. Through these sources, a clear picture of women missionaries emerges: their social background and motivation; their lives on the mission-field and their place in mission hierarchies; their selection and training; and their educational, evangelical, and medical work. The book concludes with an assessment of their achievements and impact on foreign societies.

This book explores the unstudied nature of diaspora among young Korean, Japanese and Chinese women living and studying in the West. Why do women move? What are the actual conditions of their transnational lives? How do they make sense of their transnational lives through the experience of the media? Are they becoming cosmopolitan subjects? Exploring the key questions within their particular socio-economic and cultural contexts, this book analyzes the contradictions of cosmopolitan identity formation and challenges the general assumptions of cosmopolitanism. It considers the highly visible, fastest growing, yet little studied phenomenon of women’s transnational migration and the role of the media in everyday life, offering detailed empirical data on the nature of the women’s diaspora. Drawing on a wide range of perspectives from media and communications, sociology, cultural studies and anthropology, the book provides an empirically grounded and theoretically insightful investigation into this evolving phenomenon.

Transnational Matrilineage offers a novel approach to Asian American literature, including texts by Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Mei Ng, Nora Okja Keller and Vineeta Vijayaragahavan, with particular attention to depictions of transnational solidarity (that is the sense of community between women of different cultures or cultural affiliations) between Asian-born mothers and their American-born daughters. While focusing on the mother-daughter conflicts these texts portray, this book also contributes to ongoing debates in transnational feminism by scrutinizing the representation of Asia in Asian American literature.

Jade Snow Wong’s autobiography portrays her coming-of-age in San Francisco's Chinatown, offering a rich depiction of her immigrant family and her strict upbringing, as well as her rebellion against family and societal expectations for a Chinese woman. Originally published in 1950, Fifth Chinese Daughter was one of the most widely read works by an Asian American author in the twentieth century. The US State Department even sent its charismatic young author on a four-month speaking tour throughout Asia. Cited as an influence by prominent Chinese American writers such as Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, Fifth Chinese Daughter is a foundational work in Asian American literature. It was written at a time when few portraits of Asian American life were available, and no similar works were as popular and broadly appealing. This new edition includes the original illustrations by Kathryn Uhl and features an introduction by Leslie Bow, who critically examines the changing reception and enduring legacy of the book and offers insight into Wong’s life as an artist and an ambassador of Chinese American culture.

Through the use of epigraphical evidence, Leslie C. Orr brings into focus the activities and identities of the temple women (devadasis) of medieval South India. This book shows how temple women's initiative and economic autonomy involved them in medieval temple politics and allowed them to establish themselves in roles with particular social and religious meanings. This study suggests new ways of understanding the character of the temple woman and, more generally, of the roles of women in Indian religion and society.

At a time of significant change in the precarious world of female individualization, this collection explores such phenomena by critically incorporating the parameters of popular media culture into the overarching paradigm of gender relations, economics and politics of everyday life.

This unique and groundbreaking book seeks to re-focus gender debate onto the issue of daughter discrimination - a phenomenon still hidden and unacknowledged across the world. It asks the controversial question of why millions of girls do not appear to be surviving to adulthood in contemporary Asia. In the first major study available of this emotive and sensitive issue, Elisabeth Croll investigates the extent of discrimination against female children in Asia and shifts the focus of attention firmly from son-preference to daughter-discrimination. This book brings together demographic data and anthropological field studies to reveal the multiple ways in which girls are disadvantaged, from excessive child mortality to the withholding of health care and education on the basis of gender. Focusing especially on China and India, the book reveals the surprising coincidence of increasing daughter discrimination with rising economic development, declining fertility and the generally improved status of women in East and South Asia. Essential reading for all those interested in gender in contemporary society.

Hariti is the ancient Indian goddess of childbirth and women healers, known at one time throughout South and Southeast Asia from India to Nepal and Bali. Daughters of Hariti looks at her 'daughters' today, female midwives and healers in many different cultures across the region. It also traces the transformation of childbirth in these cultures under the impact of Western biomedical technology, national and international health policies and the wider factors of social and economic change. The authors ask what can be done to improve the high rates of maternal and infant deaths and illnesses still associated with childbirth in most societies in this area and whether the wholesale replacement of indigenous knowledge by Western biomedical technology is necessarily a good thing.