This important new work is a study of the everyday lives of the inhabitants of São Paulo in the nineteenth century. Full of vivid detail, the book concentrates on the lives of working women--black, white, Indian, mulatta, free, freed, and slaves, and their struggles to survive. Drawing on official statistics, and on the accounts of travelers and judicial records, the author paints a lively picture of the jobs, both legal and illegal, that were performed by women. Her research leads to some surprising discoveries, including the fact that many women were the main providers for their families and that their work was crucial to the running of several urban industries. This book, which is a unique record of women's lives across social and race strata in a multicultural society, should be of interest to students and researchers in women's studies, urban studies, historians, geographers, economists, sociologists, and anthropologists.

In Working Women, Working Men, Joel Wolfe traces the complex historical development of the working class in Sào Paulo, Brazil, Latin America's largest industrial center. He studies the way in which Sào Paulo's working men and women experienced Brazil's industrialization, their struggles to gain control over their lives within a highly authoritarian political system, and their rise to political prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a diverse range of sources--oral histories along with union, industry, and government archival materials--Wolfe's account focuses not only on labor leaders and formal Left groups, but considers the impact of grassroots workers' movements as well. He pays particular attention to the role of gender in the often-contested relations between leadership groups and thee rank and file. Wolfe's analysis illuminates how various class and gender ideologies influenced the development of unions, industrialists' strategies, and rank-and-file organizing and protest activities. This study reveals how workers in Sào Paulo maintained a local grassroots social movement that, by the mid-1950s, succeeded in seizing control of Brazil's state-run official unions. By examining the actions of these workers in their rise to political prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, this book provides a new understanding of the sources and development of populist politics in Brazil.

"Global health security, focused on a firefighting short-term response efforts fail to consider the differential impacts of outbreaks on women. For example, the policy response to the Zika outbreak centred on limiting the spread of the vector through civic participation and asking women to defer pregnancy. Both actions are inherently gendered and reveal a distinct lack of consideration of the everyday lives of women. These policies placed women in a position whereby were blamed if they had a child born with Congenital Zika Syndrome, and at the same time governments required women to undertake invisible labour for vector control. What does this tell us about the role of women in global health security? This feminist critique of the Zika outbreak, argues that global health security has thus far lacked a substantive feminist engagement, with the result that the very policies created to manage an outbreak of disease disproportionately fail to protect women. Women are both differentially infected and affected by epidemics. Yet, the dominant policy narrative of global health security has created pathways which focus on protecting the international spread of disease to state economies, rather than protecting those who are most at risk. As such, the state-based structure of global health security provides the fault-line for global health security and women. This book highlights the ways in which women are disadvantaged by global health security policy, through engagement with feminist security studies concepts of visibility; social and stratified reproduction; intersectionality; and structural violence. It argues that it was no coincidence that poor, black women living in low quality housing were the most affected by the Zika outbreak and will continue to be so, until global health security is gender mainstreamed. More broadly, I ask what would global health policy look like if it were to take gender seriously, and how would this impact global disease control sustainability?"--

John French analyzes the emergence of the Brazilian system of politics and labor relations between 1900 and 1953 in the industrial municipalities of Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano do Sul. These municipalities, which constitute the so-

This book shows how Brazil is leading the way for the rest of Latin America in fighting forced labour.

Sri Lanka has shown remarkable persistence in low female labor force participation rates—at 36 percent from 2015 to 2017, compared with 75 percent for same-aged men—despite overall economic growth and poverty reduction over the past decade. The trend stands in contrast to the country’s achievements in human capital development that favor women, such as high levels of female education and low total fertility rates, as well as its status as an upper-middle-income country. This study intends to better understand the puzzle of women’s poor labor market outcomes in Sri Lanka. Using nationally representative secondary survey data—as well as primary qualitative and quantitative research—it tests three hypotheses that would explain gender gaps in labor market outcomes: (1) household roles and responsibilities, which fall disproportionately on women, and the associated sociophysical constraints on women’s mobility; (2) a human capital mismatch, whereby women are not acquiring the proper skills demanded by job markets; and (3) gender discrimination in job search, hiring, and promotion processes. Further, the analysis provides a comparison of women’s experience of the labor market between the years leading up to the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war (2006†“09) and the years following the civil war (2010†“15). The study recommends priority areas for addressing the multiple supply- and demand-side factors to improve women’s labor force participation rates and reduce other gender gaps in labor market outcomes. It also offers specific recommendations for improving women’s participation in the five private sector industries covered by the primary research: commercial agriculture, garments, tourism, information and communication technology, and tea estate work. The findings are intended to influence policy makers, educators, and employment program practitioners with a stake in helping Sri Lanka achieve its vision of inclusive and sustainable job creation and economic growth. The study also aims to contribute to the work of research institutions and civil society in identifying the most effective means of engaging more women— and their untapped potential for labor, innovation, and productivity—in Sri Lanka’s future.

We document the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian labor market focusing on employment, wages and hours worked using the nationally representative household surveys PNAD-Continua and PNAD COVID. Sectors most susceptible to the shock because they are more contact-intensive and less teleworkable, such as construction, domestic services and hospitality, suffered large job losses and reductions in hours. Given low income workers experienced the largest decline in earnings, extreme poverty and the Gini coefficient based on labor income increased by around 9.2 and 5 percentage points, respectively, due to the immediate shock. The government’s broad based, temporary Emergency Aid transfer program more than offset the labor income losses for the bottom four deciles, however, such that poverty relative to the pre-COVID baseline fell. At a cost of around 4 percent of GDP in 2020 such support is not fiscally sustainable beyond the short-term and ended in late 2020. The challenge will be to avoid a sharp increase in poverty and inequality if the labor market does not pick up sufficiently fast in 2021.

Trade can dramatically improve women’s lives, creating new jobs, enhancing consumer choices, and increasing women’s bargaining power in society. It can also lead to job losses and a concentration of work in low-skilled employment. Given the complexity and specificity of the relationship between trade and gender, it is essential to assess the potential impact of trade policy on both women and men and to develop appropriate, evidence-based policies to ensure that trade helps to enhance opportunities for all. Research on gender equality and trade has been constrained by limited data and a lack of understanding of the connections among the economic roles that women play as workers, consumers, and decision makers. Building on new analyses and new sex-disaggregated data, Women and Trade: The Role of Trade in Promoting Gender Equality aims to advance the understanding of the relationship between trade and gender equality and to identify a series of opportunities through which trade can improve the lives of women.

The first social history examining all aspects of Brazil's radical transition from a predominantly rural society to an urban one.