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The Federal Democratic Government of Ethiopia has declared its unequivocal commitment to the equitable socioeconomic development of women, with the announcement of its National Policy on Women in 1993 and the promulgation of a new constitution in 1995. However, the implementation of the policy is proving to be a formidable task. The paper highlights these challenges and discusses legal, regulatory, and institutional issues that may impede the implementation of the policy.

In 1810, a Scottish student named Jane Cumming accused her school mistresses, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods, of having an affair in the presence of their students. Dame Helen Cumming Gordon, the wealthy and powerful grandmother of the accusing student, advised her friends to remove their daughters from the Drumsheugh boarding school. Within days, the institution was deserted and the two women were deprived of their livelihoods. Award-winning author Lillian Faderman recreates the events surround...

The distinct personal laws that govern the major religious groups are a major aspect of Indian multiculturalism and secularism, and support specific gendered rights in family life. Nation and Family is the most comprehensive study to date of the public discourses, processes of social mobilization, legislation and case law that formed India's three major personal law systems, which govern Hindus, Muslims, and Christians. It for the first time systematically compares Indian experiences to those in...

Victim's Stories and the Advancement of Human Rights takes on a set of questions suggested by the worldwide persistence of human rights abuse and the prevalence of victims' stories in human rights campaigns, truth commissions, and international criminal tribunals: What conceptions of victims are presumed in contemporary human rights discourse? How do conventional narrative templates fail victims of human rights abuse and resist raising novel human rights issues? What is empathy, and how can vic...

Entertainment and profit constitute the driving forces behind most popular representations of incarcerated women. Some cinematic representations, however, and the women-in-prison genre especially, can generate complex legal meanings and leave viewers feeling unsettled about women's incarceration. Focusing on five exemplary films and one television series, from 1933 to the present, Women, Film, and Law asks how fictional representations explore, shape, and refine beliefs about women's incarcerati...

Young women talk about what led them to cross the line, and how they both coped with, and learned from, their experiences. The collection also includes young women who have had friends or family in jail, and what it has meant for them.

Unruly women are not often represented in a good light. Whether historical, or fictional, disruptive women with their real or imagined excesses have long provided the material for literary and legal narratives. This probing new work analyzes a series of literary, legal, and historical texts to demonstrate the persistence of certain gender stereotypes. In her 1820 adultery trial, Queen Caroline was depicted in a cartoon riding into the House of Lords on a black ram that had the face of her Itali...

Signed into law in 2000, the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) defined the crime of human trafficking and brought attention to an issue previously unknown to most Americans. But while human trafficking is widely considered a serious and despicable crime, there has been far less consensus as to how to approach the problem—owing in part to a pervasive emphasis on forced prostitution that overshadows repugnant practices in other labor sectors affecting vulnerable populations. Responding to...

Technological developments move at lightening pace and can bring with them new possibilities for social harm. This book brings together original empirical and theoretical work examining how digital technologies both create and sustain various forms of gendered violence and provide platforms for resistance and criminal justice intervention. This edited collection is organised around two key themes of facilitation and resistance, with an emphasis through the whole collection on the development o...

Contradicting the views commonly held by westerners, many Muslim countries in fact engage in a wide spectrum of reform, with the status of women as a central dimension. This anthology counters the myth that Islam and feminism are always or necessarily in opposition. A multidisciplinary group of scholars examine ideology, practice, and reform efforts in the areas of marriage, divorce, abortion, violence against women, inheritance, and female circumcision across the Islamic world, illuminating how...

The influence of women in the colonial family and the community is examined using tax and probate records of southside Colonial Virginia.

Advances in genetic engineering have increased interest in the production of inoculants for crop plants. This is obviously an area of biotechnology that is relevant to the hungry world's struggle against diseases which affect food crops, decreasing yields and impoverishing the soil. This book arose from an SGM Ecology Group Symposium, held in Warwick, April 1988, which addressed the state of the research at present and highlighted possibilities for the future. The text aims to cover all the pres...

Domestic Violence as State Crime presents a provocative challenge to the way that domestic violence is understood and addressed. Underpinned by a radical feminist perspective, the central argument of this book is that domestic violence against women constitutes a patriarchal state crime. By analysing the international, collective, structural, and institutional dimensions of this harm, the author outlines a spectrum of state complicity ranging from passive bystander to active producer, participan...

Westward Bound debunks the myth of Canada's peaceful West and the masculine conceptions of law and violence upon which it rests by shifting the focus from Mounties and whisky traders to criminal cases involving women between 1886 and 1940. Erickson's analysis of these cases shows that, rather than a desire to protect, official responses to the most intimate or violent acts betrayed an impulse to shore up the liberal order by maintaining boundaries between men and women, Native people and newcome...

Situating privacy within the context of political philosophy, this book highlights the way in which struggles concerning the meaning of privacy have always been political. Different conceptions of privacy are here shown to involve diverse assumptions about ontology: our conceptions of self, culture, society and communication. Privacy theory's debt to Locke, Kant or Mill, and what is at stake in their conceptual frameworks, is examined. The extent to which the term "privacy" has been used to the...

Whom, over the past two centuries, has society construed as sexual "victims"? Where and when did the notion of consent—so crucial for law and politics today—emerge? In this brilliantly insightful work, Pamela Susan Haag traces the evolution of public wisdom on some of society's most private and controversial matters. At once an investigation of social history, popular culture, legal doctrine, and political theory, her book shows how in contemporary America the history of sexual rights is inextri...

Are women still oppressed? Is paid employment the key to liberation? Should pornography be banned? Do women have an absolute right to abortion? Can women in government really make a difference? In this comprehensive study, Valerie Bryson draws on a wide range of theoretical, empirical and comparative material to provide a lucid account of feminist debates and the ways in which political disagreements stem from underlying theoretical assumptions. By disentangling questions of style and strategy f...

This innovative and thought-provoking Research Handbook explores not only current debates in the area of gender, sexuality and the law but also points the way for future socio-legal research and scholarship. It presents wide-ranging insights and debates from across the globe, including Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and Australia, with contributions from leading scholars and activists alongside exciting emergent voices. Chapters address a range of current arguments and issues, providing an enhan...

This book addresses the question of how progressive Muslim women's organisations have contributed to the reformation of Islamic law on gender and promoted women's rights in contemporary Indonesia. It discusses both legal scholarship and thinking, and also activism and the implementation of ideas. It traces how views on this issue and government policies have evolved from the Dutch colonial period, examines how far women's organisations are fragmented and local, and explores conservative Islam an...