Roadblocks to Equality: Women Challenging Boundaries

Covering a wide range of topics and dealing with real-life issues, these international contributors, who are both male and female and who cross a variety of boundaries—social, cultural, and political—examine various dimensions of women’s lived experiences in order to address the challenges that arise from women’s contemporary struggles in relation to globalization, human rights, and a political economy.

The book is divided into four main sections, and each section includes an introductory essay, and then each chapter recaps some of the history of the given issue before it goes on to examine its current status. Essay topics include: women in the workplace and their push toward wage equity; support for working mothers and the importance of universal, affordable childcare; women in academia and women in politics; aging as a gendered experience, why aging and women’s activism matter, and the importance of storytelling; the experiences of girls where the presence of feminism in their lives is, and has been, taken for granted; how women have been perceived by advertisers and how they have been represented in the media; the international sex trade, pornography, and the question of men’s responsibility; and women and human rights, in both a local and a global context.

Contributors include: Patrizia Albanese, Anurita Bains, Susan Bryant, Walter DeKeseredy, Natalie Dias, Melissa Ditmore, Peter Eglin, Danielle Fagen, Kathleen Gotts, Sylvia Hale, Mandy Hall, Robert Jensen, Jeffery Klaehn, Michèle Martin, Claudia Mitchell, Michael Parenti, Richard Poulin, Jocey Quinn, Jacqui Reid-Walsh, Carole Roy, Martin D. Schwartz, and Nancy Snow.