South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world, and a femicide rate that is more than five times the world average.

In this book, Dr Nechama Brodie looks at the story of femicide in South Africa over the past forty years. She interrogates police, public health and media data, exploring the history of violence against women in an entirely new way that contextualises and challenges the state and public response to what has, in reality, been a crisis for decades.

Gendering the Trans-Pacific World introduces an emergent interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field that highlights the inextricable link between gender and the trans-Pacific world. The anthology examines the geographies of empire, the significance of intimacy and affect, the importance of beauty and the body, and the circulation of culture.

"Reagan's Mandate-Anecdotes from Inside Washington's Iron Triangle," describes how Washington's Iron Triangle--the combination of Congress, lobbies, and Administration --changed our national government thirty years ago. The book recounts Dr. McLennan's journey, in the 1970s and 1980s, from university professor to minority staff member on the House Budget Committee., to the office of a young Senator, to the Treasury Department to work on tax reform, and to the Commerce Department where as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Trade Information and Analysis she represented the U.S. to international organizations and supervised the preparation of numerous government publications. The memoir is unique because Dr. McLennan was the only Congressional staff member to work both on Reagan's first budget in the House and his first tax bill in the Senate. These bills passed Congress with strong bipartisan support. In 1984, as the only Congressional staffer to move to the Treasury Department, she participated in the preparation of the study that proposed tax reform. Based on this study, Congress in 1986 reformed the income tax with bipartisan support. All of these events occurred at a time when very few women held senior positions in the U. S. government When Dr. McLennan entered the job market many women didn't work, and most didn't pursue higher education. The only female in many college classes, she became one of very few women in 1965 who earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Wisconsin. Only small numbers of women then worked as business executives, professors, lawyers, doctors, or senior government officials. "Reagan's Mandate" tells about women's progress in the U.S. job market over the last part of the twentieth century. "Reagan's Mandate" shows how our federal government made decisions when the President set the agenda, Congress passed the laws, and elected political majorities were small and weak. The memoir addresses election year issues of concern to people who care about the day-to-day operations and policy change in our government: budget balancing, taxes, and international trade.

"Since the fall of the Berlin wall there has been a surprising dearth of high quality of scholarship on legal culture in the communist successor states of East Central Europe. In this excellent book Barbara Havelkova engages with the reversal of many of the advances the socialist period made in gender relations, examining the historical roots of the current failure of Czech law to engage with the discriminatory practices that have negatively affected the lives of women. She does this by a forensic excavation of law, discourses and practices of the socialist era revealing the patriarchal assumptions underpinning them that became deeply embedded in Czech legal culture, and that have been carried forward to the present day. The book is a compelling read. It provides answers to many of the questions that have perplexed feminists about the post-soviet transition and at the same time speaks more generally to the debates surrounding the troubling rightward shift in the politics of the communist successor states of Europe." Professor Judith Pallot, President of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies "In Gender Equality in Law: Uncovering the Legacies of Czech State Socialism, Barbara Havelkova offers a sober and sophisticated socio-legal account of gender equality law in Czechia. Tracing gender equality norms from their origins under state socialism, Havelkova shows how the dominant understanding of the differences between women and men as natural and innate combined with a post-socialist understanding of rights as freedom to shape the views of key Czech legal actors and to thwart the transformative potential of EU sex discrimination law. Havelkova's compelling feminist legal genealogy of gender equality in Czechia illuminates the path dependency of gender norms and the antipathy to substantive gender equality that is common among the formerly state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Her deft analysis of the relationship between gender and legal norms is especially relevant today as the legitimacy of gender equality laws is increasingly precarious." Professor Judy Fudge, Kent Law School Gender equality law in Czechia, as in other parts of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe, is facing serious challenges. When obliged to adopt, interpret and apply anti-discrimination law as a condition of membership of the EU, Czech legislators and judges have repeatedly expressed hostility and demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding of key ideas underpinning it. This important new study explores this scepticism to gender equality law, examining it with reference to legal and socio-legal developments that started in the state-socialist past and that remain relevant today. The book examines legal developments in gender-relevant areas, most importantly in equality and anti-discrimination law. But it goes further, shedding light on the underlying understandings of key concepts such as women, gender, equality, discrimination and rights. In so doing, it shows the fundamental intellectual and conceptual difficulties faced by gender equality law in Czechia. These include an essentialist understanding of differences between men and women, a notion that equality and anti-discrimination law is incompatible with freedom, and a perception that existing laws are objective and neutral, while any new gender-progressive regulation of social relations is an unacceptable interference with the 'natural social order'. Timely and provocative, this book will be required reading for all scholars of equality and gender and the law.

An in-depth history of selected New Religions that highlights the roles of women in their founding and continual practice Women in New Religions offers an engaging look at women's evolving place in the birth and development of new religious movements. It focuses on four disparate new religions-Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, The Family International, and Wicca-to illuminate their implications for gender socialization, religious leadership and participation, sexuality, and family ideals. Religious worldviews and gender roles interact with one another in complicated ways. This is especially true within new religions, which frequently set roles for women in ways that help the movements to define their boundaries in relation to the wider society. As new religious movements emerge, they often position themselves in opposition to dominant society and concomitantly assert alternative roles for women. But these religions are not monolithic: rather than defining gender in rigid and repressive terms, new religions sometimes offer possibilities to women that are not otherwise available. Vance traces expectations for women as the religions emerge, and transformation of possibilities and responsibilities for women as they mature. Weaving theory with examination of each movement's origins, history, and beliefs and practices, this text contextualizes and situates ideals for women in new religions. The book offers an accessible analysis of the complex factors that influence gender ideology and its evolution in new religious movements, including the movements' origins, charismatic leadership and routinization, theology and doctrine, and socio-historical contexts. It shows how religions shape definitions of women's place in a way that is informed by response to social context, group boundaries, and identity.

Theorizing Women and Leadership: New Insights and Contributions from Multiple Perspectives is the fifth volume in the Women and Leadership: Research, Theory, and Practice series. This cross?disciplinary series, from the International Leadership Association, enhances leadership knowledge and improves leadership development of women around the world. The purpose of this volume is to provide a forum for women to theorize about women's leadership in multiple ways and in multiple contexts. Theorizing has been a viewed as a gendered activity (Swedberg, 2014), and this series of chapters seeks to upend that imbalance. The chapters are written by women who represent multiple disciplines, cultures, races, and subject positions. The diversity extends into research paradigm and method, and the chapters combine to illuminate the multiple ways of knowing about and being a woman leader. Twenty?first century leadership scholars acknowledge the importance of context, and many are considering post?heroic leadership models based on relationships rather than traits. This volume contributes to this discussion by offering a diverse array of perspectives and ways of knowing about leadership and leading. The purpose of the volume is to provide readers with not only interesting new ideas about women and leadership, but also to highlight the diverse epistemologies that can contribute to theorizing about women leaders. Some chapters represent typical social scientific practices and processes, while others represent newer knowledge forms and ways of knowing. The volume contributors adopt various epistemological positions, ranging from objective researcher to embedded co?participant. The chapters link their new findings to existing empirical or conceptual work and illustrate how the findings extend, amend, contradict, or confirm existing research. The diversity of the chapters is one of the volume's strengths because it illuminates the multiple ways that leadership theory for women can be advanced. Typically, research based on a realist perspective is more valued in the academy. This perspective has indeed generated robust information about leadership in general and women's leadership in particular. However, readers of this volume are offered an opportunity to explore multiple ways of knowing, different ways of researching, and are invited to de?center researcher objectivity. The authors of the chapters offer conceptual and empirical findings, illuminate multiple and alternative research practices, and in the end suggest future directions for quantitative, qualitative, and mixed?methods research.

Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice combines a critical survey of the most current developments in the emergent field of Masculinity Studies with both a historical overview of how masculinity has been constructed within British Literature from the Middle Ages to the present and a special focus on developments in the 20th and 21st centuries. The volume combines seminal articles on the most important concepts in Masculinity Studies by acknowledged experts such as Raewyn Connell, Todd Reeser, and Richard Collier with new and innovative analyses of key British literary texts combining Literary and Cultural Studies approaches with those currently deployed in Masculinity Studies, Gender Studies, Legal Studies, Postcolonial Studies as well as methodologies derived from sociology.

A wide-reaching collection of groundbreaking feminist documents from around the world Feminist Manifestos is an unprecedented collection of 150 documents from feminist organizations and gatherings in over 50 countries over the course of three centuries. In the first book of its kind, the manifestos are shown to contain feminist theory and recommend actions for change, and also to expand our very conceptions of feminist thought and activism. Covering issues from political participation, education, religion and work to reproduction, violence, racism, and environmentalism, the manifestos together challenge simplistic definitions of gender and feminist movements in exciting ways. In a wide-ranging introduction, Penny Weiss explores the value of these documents, especially how they speak with and to each other. In addition, an introduction to each individual document contextualizes and enhances our understanding of it. Weiss is particularly invested in how communities work together toward social change, which is demonstrated through her choice to include only collectively authored texts. By assembling these documents into an accessible volume, Weiss reveals new possibilities for social justice and ways to advocate for equality. A unique and inspirational collection, Feminist Manifestos expands and evolves our understanding of feminism through the self-described agendas of women from every ethnic group, religion, and region in the world.