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Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from Burkina Faso in West Africa, the consequences of life-threatening ‘near-miss’ obstetric complications for women's work across domestic, agricultural and economic spheres over a four-year period are examined.
Abstract: Global advocacy campaigns increasingly highlight the negative impact of reproductive morbidity on economic productivity and development in order to justify donor investment in maternal health. Anthropological approaches nuance such narrow economic estimations of reproductive health. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from Burkina Faso in West Africa, this paper analyses the dynamic, and sometimes contradictory, relationship between women's work and reproductive health in impoverished communities. Specifically, it examines the consequences of life-threatening ‘near-miss’ obstetric complications for women's work across domestic, agricultural and economic spheres over a four-year period. Such events provide a window onto the diverse ways in which production and reproduction are intimately linked within women's everyday lives. Reproduction and production entail sources of potential empowerment and enhancement, as well as potential threats, to health and well-being. In the aftermath of ‘near-miss’ events, the realms of reproduction and production sometimes jeopardise each other and at other times reinforce each other, while strength in one domain can compensate for weakness in the other. Women's experiences thus reveal how ‘production’ and ‘reproduction’ are mutually constituted, challenging the purely instrumental accounts of pregnancy-related ‘productivity loss’ that dominate current global health discourse.

20 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the increased use of conditionality and sanctions in relation to female benefit claimants, particularly lone mothers, writes off their caring and informal work and pushes these women into low-paid, highly gendered employment in a precarious labour market.
Abstract: This is the second paper of a 2-part article which draws on interdisciplinary feminist perspectives to critique New Labour's welfare reform agenda. Through examining the Welfare Reform Bill and the subsequent Welfare Reform Act 2009, the paper argues that the increased use of conditionality and sanctions in relation to female benefit claimants – particularly lone mothers – “writes-off” their caring and informal work and pushes these women into low-paid, highly gendered employment in a precarious labour market. Despite the gender neutral language of ‘lone parents’, the 2009 Act continues a classed and often racialised government tradition of targeting lone mothers in an attempt to privatise social issues, such as povertv and unemployment. Rather than alleviating child poverty and developing the employability skills of claimants – as maintained by the Government – welfare-to-work measures exacerbate the economic insecurities experienced by poor women and their families, restricts their autonomy in choosing ...

20 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Jan 1979-Africa
TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala Uganda and found that women who are prosperous have love affairs and sexual pleasure is celebrated.
Abstract: This paper examines the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala Uganda. The intention is to indicate the relative standards of living of households of various composition and to decide whether the practice of soliciting money from lovers is better viewed as a preferred alternative to employment or as an essential supplementing of inadequate incomes. If lovers are necessary to the maintenance of single women and their children in African cities analyses of extra-marital sexual behaviour which rely only on arguments about marriage rules and roles and personal values are rendered inadequate. Securing a paying lover may be indispensable to a woman who wishes to live and bring up children in town and the practice may tell us more about her wish to educate her children or her dislike of rural life than it does about her sexual and marital preferences. Love affairs in short may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance than as an adjunct to a discussion of marriage. The data which I present here do not reduce a lovers importance to a woman to that of a charitable institution or welfare state: women who are prosperous have love affairs and sexual pleasure is celebrated. They do indicate however the difficulties faced by a woman anxious to remain in town if she is not prepared to take lovers and to select them at least in part according to financial considerations. I hope too that the method which I use for working out standards of living available to households may prove useful as a means of establishing comparability between living standards in different cities. (excerpt)

20 citations

01 Nov 2015
TL;DR: Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production, edited by Wilma A. Dunaway Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013 as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women’s Work and Households in Global Production, edited by Wilma A. Dunaway Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. 285 pp. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9780804789080. One of the highlights of this superb collection of essays on gendered commodity chains, a highlight partly because it draws on the historically seminal work on commodity chains by Immanuel Wallerstein (who is also responsible for the Foreword), is that the authors make liberal reference to pioneering scholars in the fields of women’s paid and unpaid work such as Lourdes Beneria, Diane Elson, Ruth Pearson, Veronika Bennholdt-Thompson, and Maria Mies. These writers broke critical new analytical ground in the 1970s and 1980s in emphasizing the ways in which “production” and “reproduction” were profoundly interlinked with one another. To revisit their perspectives on the myriad forms of female labor that contribute to the accumulation of capital makes for a volume that does serious—and justifiably due —service to feminist theorizing and knowledge over nearly 50 years. Yet while avoiding the all too common fetishization to cite “just published” papers, the collective contributions to Wilma Dunaway’s Gendered Commodity Chains also provide an impressively up-to-the-minute conceptual and empirical mapping of the various ways in which contemporary global capitalism profits from the externalization of so many of its costs to women and their households, and especially the poorest on the periphery of the international economy. …

20 citations

01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: This paper explored the dynamic changes the elite women of the Lower South faced from the antebellum to the post-bellum era by exploring diaries, journals, memoirs, and newspapers from the mid to late nineteenth century.
Abstract: The topic of the American Civil War is one that has long been studied by historians. This thesis looks to the often forgotten home front and explores the dynamic changes the elite women of the Lower South faced from the antebellum to the post bellum era. Through the exploration of diaries, journals, memoirs, and newspapers from the mid to late nineteenth century, the changing roles and responsibilities of the elite women during this time period are further explored. The stories of the elite women add to the overall history of the nineteenth century Lower South and allow the reader to understand these women through a different lens. While considered wealthy and unaffected by the Civil War, the primary accounts of these women illustrate just how much their lives were changed because of the war and how they continued to change once the war was over. INDEX WORDS: American Civil War, Nineteenth century, Elite Southern women, Women, Ladies Memorial Association, Women’s work THE CHANGING ROLE OF ELITE SOUTHERN WOMEN IN THE LOWER SOUTH

20 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20235
20228
202139
202046
201952
201848