The revolt against white rule in Rhodesia nurtured incipient local feminisms in women who imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. But the country's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed these hopes. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, Carolyn Martin Shaw surveys Zimbabwean feminisms from the colonial era to today. She examines how actions as seemingly disparate as an ability to bake scones during the revolution and achieving power within a marriage in fact represent complex sources of female empowerment. She also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society--rural and urban, professional and domestic--accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, Shaw offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the prevailing view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women. The result of thirty years of experience, Women and Power in Zimbabwe addresses what happened when a generation of African women deferred their dreams of empowerment.

The revolt against white rule in Rhodesia nurtured incipient local feminisms in women who imagined independence as a road to gender equity and economic justice. But the country's rebirth as Zimbabwe and Robert Mugabe's rise to power dashed these hopes. Using history, literature, participant observation, and interviews, Carolyn Martin Shaw surveys Zimbabwean feminisms from the colonial era to today. She examines how actions as clearly disparate as baking scones for self-protection, carrying guns in the liberation, and feeling morally superior to men represent sources of female empowerment. She also presents the ways women across Zimbabwean society--rural and urban, professional and domestic--accommodated or confronted post-independence setbacks. Finally, Shaw offers perspectives on the ways contemporary Zimbabwean women depart from the prevailing view that feminism is a Western imposition having little to do with African women. The result of thirty years of experience, Women and Power in Zimbabwe addresses the promises of feminism and femininity for generations of African women.

With a foreword by Terence Ranger this book offers a thought provoking analysis of women's experiences with ZANLA during the war of independence.It challenges official orthodoxy that a gende revolution occured in this period and that a generation of liberated women emerged from the struggle.The research demostrates that while ZANLA extensively mobilised women as porters, nurses, teachers, secretaries and cooks - all crucial to the struggle and glorified in the rhetoric, in substance, the movement percieved these roles as secondary to the activities of men. The author who has had access to the ZANU archives, scrutinises a doctrinal terrain laced with tension between ideology and tradition principles, between the more and less educated cadres and between the women on the ground and the leadership.

Delving into the pressing topic of gender and politics, this volume provides fresh comparative perspectives on "what works" to promote women in politics today. Inspiring and informative, Women, Power, and Political Representation offers a comprehensive overview of the role women play in contemporary politics, and pinpoints the reasons behind their underrepresentation. Discussing the challenges and opportunities women face when running for office, as well as their experiences as political leaders, this book offers a broad and thoughtful overview of the pitfalls encountered by women, from gender biases to sexual harassment, in the notoriously male dominated political arena. Featuring a range of voices that articulate a path towards women’s political advancement and equality, Women, Power, and Political Representation is an important and timely resource for scholars, students, and women working professionally in Canadian and international politics.

The book explains an unexpected consequence of the decrease in conflict in Africa after the 1990s. Analysis of cross-national data and in-depth comparisons of case studies of Uganda, Liberia and Angola show that post-conflict countries have significantly higher rates of women's political representation in legislatures and government compared with countries that have not undergone major conflict. They have also passed more legislative reforms and made more constitutional changes relating to women's rights. The study explains how and why these patterns emerged, tying these outcomes to the conjuncture of the rise of women's movements, changes in international women's rights norms and, most importantly, gender disruptions that occur during war. This book will help scholars, students, women's rights activists, international donors, policy makers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and others better understand some of the circumstances that are most conducive to women's rights reform today and why.

Winner of a 2017 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, this moving manifesto “empowers women to access a fearlessness that will enable community progress” (Essence). Through one incredible woman’s journey from a small Zimbabwe village to becoming one of the world’s most recognizable voices in women’s empowerment and education, this book “can help any woman achieve her full potential” (Kirkus Reviews). Before Tererai Trent landed on Oprah’s stage as her “favorite guest of all time,” she was a woman with a forgotten dream. As a young girl in a cattle-herding village in Zimbabwe, she dreamed of receiving an education but instead was married young and by eighteen, without a high school graduation, she was already a mother of three. Tererai encountered a visiting American woman who assured her that anything was possible, reawakening her sacred dream. Tererai planted her dreams deep in the earth and prayed they would grow. They did, and now not only has she earned her PhD but she has also built schools for girls in Zimbabwe, with funding from Oprah. The Awakened Woman: A Guide for Remembering & Igniting Your Sacred Dreams is her accessible, intimate, and evocative guide that teaches nine essential lessons to encourage all women to reexamine their dreams and uncover the power hidden within them—power that can recreate our world for the better. Tererai points out that there is a massive, untapped, global resource in women who have, for one reason or another, set aside their wisdom, their skills, and their dreams in order to take care of the personal business of their lives. Not only is this a type of invisible suffering experienced by countless women, this rich resource is a secret weapon for improving our world. Women have the capacity to inspire, to create, to transform—and Tererai’s call to action “shines as a beacon of hope to women everywhere” (Danica McKellar, actress and New York Times bestselling author).

In Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, John Coakley explores male-authored narratives of the lives of Catherine of Siena, Hildegard of Bingen, Angela of Foligno, and six other female prophets or mystics of the late Middle Ages. His readings reveal the complex personal and literary relationships between these women and the clerics who wrote about them. Coakley's work also undermines simplistic characterizations of male control over women, offering an important contribution to medieval religious history. Coakley shows that these male-female relationships were marked by a fundamental tension between power and fascination: the priests and monks were supposed to hold authority over the women entrusted to their care, but they often switched roles, as the men became captivated with the women's spiritual gifts. In narratives of such women, the male authors reflect directly on the relationship between the women's powers and their own. Coakley argues that they viewed these relationships as gendered partnerships that brought together female mystical power and male ecclesiastical authority without placing one above the other. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power chronicles a wide-ranging experiment in the balance of formal and informal powers, in which it was assumed to be thoroughly imaginable for both sorts of authority, in their distinctly gendered terms, to coexist and build on each other. The men's writings reflect an extended moment in western Christianity when clerics had enough confidence in their authority to actually question its limits. After about 1400, however, clerics underwent a crisis of confidence, and such a questioning of institutional power was no longer considered safe. Instead of seeing women as partners, their revelatory powers began to be viewed as evidence of witchcraft.

Is patriarchy on the decline, or is it merely its form that is changing? What effect does development have on gender relations, and how do patriarchal structures affect the development process?

As an instrument which addresses the circumstances which affect women's lives and enjoyment of rights in a diverse world, the CEDAW is slowly but surely making its mark on the development of international and national law. Using national case studies from South Asia, Southern Africa, Australia, Canada and Northern Europe, Women's Human Rights examines the potential and actual added value of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in comparison and interaction with other equality and anti-discrimination mechanisms. The studies demonstrate how state and non-state actors have invoked, adopted or resisted the CEDAW and related instruments in different legal, political, economic and socio-cultural contexts, and how the various international, regional and national regimes have drawn inspiration and learned from each other.

Despite centuries of campaigning, women still earn less and have less power than men. Equality remains a goal not yet reached. In this incisive account of why this is the case, Mary Evans argues that optimistic narratives of progress and emancipation have served to obscure long-term structural inequalities between women and men, structural inequalities which are not only about gender but also about general social inequality. In widening the lenses on the persistence of gender inequality, Evans shows how in contemporary debates about social inequality gender is often ignored, implicitly side-lining critical aspects of relations between women and men. This engaging short book attempts to join up some of the dots in the ways that we think about both social and gender inequality, and offers a new perspective on a problem that still demands society’s full attention.