Recent trends in women's work and child survival and development in developing countries raise concerns about the relationship between these two key elements of development. This paper reviews and analyzes the methodology and findings of 50 studies of both women's work and infant feeding practices, and women's work and child nutritional status. Although the pattern of findings is complex and occasionally contradictory, the paper concludes that overall there is little evidence of a negative effect of maternal employment on child nutrition, and therefore no justification for limiting women's labor force participation on the grounds of promoting child welfare.

A combination travelogue and guidebook that tells the humorous tale of the authors' vacation in Costa Rica while also giving valuable travel tips.

Drawing on a decade of fieldwork in these communities, Isla exposes the duplicity of a neoliberal model in which the environment is converted into commercial assets, few of whose benefits flow to the local population.

This reader reflects the genesis, scope, and direction of women’s activism in a single Latin American country. It collects the voices of forty-one diverse women who live in Costa Rica, some radical, others strongly conservative, and most ranging inbetween, as they write about their lives, their problems, their aspirations. Unlike the comparative studies of women’s issues that look at several different countries, the reader provides an insider’s view of one small, but quintessentially Latin American, society. These women write of their own experience in organizing and working for change within the Costa Rican community. Some represent groups fitting into traditional “women’s movement” that wants to improve certain aspects of women’s and families’ daily lives. Still others, the “feminists,” argue forcefully that true improvement requires a profound change of power relations in society, of women’s access to power and decision making. The articles are organized into thematic groups that range from the definitions of Feminism in Costa Rica to women in Costa Rican history, women’s legal equality, discrimination against women, and the status of Women’s Studies. The brief biographies that identify each author underscore the leadership of Costa Rican women in Latin American Feminism. The founders and editors of Mujer, one of the most influential Feminist journals in Latin America, are among the authors represented in the reader. The audience for this book will include specialists interested in Latin America, in women in Latin America, and in the international women’s movement.

There is a striking scarcity of work conducted on rural labour markets in the developing world, particularly in Africa. This book aims to fill this gap by bringing together a group of contributors who boast substantial field experience researching rural wage employment in various developing countries. It provides critical perspectives on mainstream approaches to rural/agrarian development, and analysis of agrarian change and rural transformations from a long-term perspective. This book challenges the notion that rural areas in low- and middle-income countries are dominated by self-employment. It purports that this conventional view is largely due to the application of conceptual frameworks and statistical conventions that are ill-equipped to capture labour market participation. The contributions in this book offer a variety of methodological lessons for the study of rural labour markets, focusing in particular on the use of mixed methods in micro-level field research, and more emphasis on capturing occupation multiplicity. The emphasis on context, history, and specific configurations of power relations affecting rural labour market outcomes are key and reoccurring features of this book. This analysis will help readers think about policy options to improve the quantity and quality of rural wage employment, their impact on the poorest rural people, and their political feasibility in each context.

From August 4 to 8, 1980, the Science Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sponsored the symposium, "Women and the World of Work," which was held at the Hotel Sintra Estoril in the coastal area south of Lisbon, Portugal. This symposium hatl been "in progress" since 1977 when the idea to prepare a proposal for a NATO sponsored symposium on the topic of women and the military was first suggested by Dr. Walter Wilkins, then Scientific Director of the Naval Health Research Center, San Diego, California. At that time and during the previous 5 years, increasing numbers of women were being recruited into military service not only in the United States but also in several NATO-allied countries. Few research projects on the utilization of women in the military had been reported in the scientific literature with the exception of work conducted at the University of Chicago and Naval Health Research Center. Several investigators, however, were identified who had recently initiated research in this area-and who expressed interest in participating in the proposed symposium. A few months after submitting the proposal, Dr. B. A. Bayraktar, Director of the Scientific Affairs Division responded that the members of the Science Committee recommended the deletion of those segments of the tentative program which pertained to women and the military. The reason given for this suggested change was that the topic chosen was similar to the theme of other recent international conferences.