Gender Roles and Empowerment Goals: The LDS Women's Experience in Brazil

“O My Mother”: Mormon Fundamentalist Mothers in Heaven and Women's Authority

Seeking to Understand the Opposition to the Relief Society Activities of the Sesquicentennial Year

The Sesquicentennial, So What? An Assessment a Quarter Century Afterward

Reed, K.Gender and Genetics: Sociology of the Prenatal. London: Routledge. 2012. 198pp. £34.99 ISBN 978‐1‐138‐82289‐4 (pbk)

Ivory tower? Feminist women's experiences of graduate school

Gender empowerment has become one of the ways to deal with gender issues in the era of discrimination and patriarchy in gender-based life. The gender empowerment movement is a global movement that promotes women's rights by making various breakthroughs. This study aims at how gender empowerment is represented, the impact of gender empowerment and its contribution to reducing discrimination in social life so that gender equality which is the main goal of gender empowerment, can be achieved. In this study, the researcher used a feminist approach in analyzing Black Widow (2021) as data, leading to literary works representing women's daily problems. The feminist view does not limit itself to analyzing the work's aesthetic value but instead considers the significance of the relationship between social and cultural contexts. The author concludes that this research helps change cultural representations of women who always look down on women in films in future films and real life, that women can do anything just like men with gender empowerment. Keywords: Discrimination, Exploitation, Gender Empowement.

Gender and women empowerment approaches: Interventions through PRIs and CSOs in Northern India

Sex Disparities in Myocardial Infarction: Biology or Bias?

In feminist scholarship empowerment has been extensively theorised and critiqued, yet it has only recent emerged as a critical concept in energy and gender thinking. An emerging body of studies have begun to more critically theorise empowerment and the links with energy access, yet these studies give less emphasis to key aspects of empowerment as it is conceived by feminist scholars, including collectivity or community, process and social practice. In this thesis, I bring such elements into the conversation of energy, gender and empowerment, and so contribute to an ongoing tradition of feminist energy scholarship.The central aim is to explore the practices and experiences of women who are collectively organising to improve their energy systems, and the role of energy in the process of their empowerment. I do so in the context of urban and peri-urban contexts in South Africa, a country with its own tradition of gender-specialist and feminist researchers and advocates with a focus on energy. Specifically, I address:1) How, and through what practices, are women collectively organising for better energy systems?2) In what ways does organising for energy facilitate women’s empowerment?3) What role does energy play in transforming gendered identities and empowerment?My orientation is explicitly feminist and I am guided by a theoretical framework of feminist concepts, namely gender, empowerment and power. I hold the notion of empowerment with complexity, embracing the significant debates which underpin its theorisation. I investigate three case studies in urban and peri-urban South Africa, of organised groups of self-identifying women, such as people’s movements, or women’s committees, which are active at a local community level and supported by external NGOs. I have taken a feminist methodological approach, with the intention of transformative research practice and attention to both academic and political rigour. This included qualitative data collection methods, adapting a combination of narrative methods such as Oral History Interviews, and Collective Narrative Practice methods with both women and the NGOs to draw out stories and experiences of women as individuals and as collectives.I found that energy, rather than being a causal factor, is intertwined with broader societal institutions and norms which drive the conditions gendered disempowerment and inequality. Equally, energy is intertwined with femininities, conceived as shared expressions gender. In analysing the role of NGO interventions in shaping women’s experiences of collective empowerment, I unearthed the significant influence of community practice in enabling empowerment. Finally, I examined women’s experiences of empowerment, and the factors they identified as crucial to increasing their power. I found that while the materiality of energy played a role in this process, equally significant were intangible resources such as relationships, learning and theory, and skills, and in these contexts energy’s immaterial nature was also significant. In examining this notion further, I found energy to be important as a shared vision or sociotechnical imaginary in collective gendered empowerment. As such, I call for a retheorisation of energy in relation to gendered empowerment, as both a material (embedded in social practices), and as theory or imaginary, (as a set of meanings and visions in and of itself). These expanded theorisations of empowerment and energy have implications for the work of researchers, policymakers and practitioners. I offer an alternative approach to facilitating gendered empowerment with energy interventions, which I name ‘transformative energy literacy’. ​​​​​​​

This article examines narratives about culture, gender, identity and sexual health amongst Chilean and Salvadorean women living in Melbourne, Australia. We compare women’s narratives about gender roles in their home country to make sense of their experiences of migration, the tensions that arise in renegotiating their gender identities and roles in a new country and the ways these changes are experienced in terms of sexual health and well being. In comparing these past and present narratives of Chilean and Salvadorean born women, we raise a number of questions about the assumptions underpinning many of the sexual health promotion and STD prevention programmes targeted at women in migrant communities in Australia. Many of these programmes have targeted specific ‘language groups’ or ‘geographical regions’ with little attention paid to variations of cultural or socio-economic contexts within people’s home countries or the specific ways in which these impact on gender roles. Additionally, very few sexual health policies and strategies in Australia take into account the impact of the‘migration and settlement process’ and the ways these experiences influence cultural and gender identity of migrants in Australia. We propose that there is a need to build effective and flexible sexual health promotion and STDs, including HIV/AIDS, prevention strategies that build upon a dual strategy which includes men and women.

The second edition of Working Women in America: Split Dreams highlights current research on critical issues affecting American women in today's global workplace. It features updated information and examples, including extended discussions of women's activism within and outside of the workplace, the impact of globalization, the effects of the glass ceiling and sexual harassment, and women's roles in the U.S. labor movement. Retaining the focus of the first edition, this text emphasizes the continuity of women's work experience. It seeks to dispel the misconception that women's work is a recent phenomenon, when in fact women have been working throughout history. The book also addresses the constant tension and multiple roles that women must manage. The lives of working women are indeed characterized by split dreams: most women who work are constantly juggling their work and family dreams. It is therefore misleading to concentrate solely on the workplace when seeking to understand women's position at work. Rather, one must pay attention to the connections among societal institutions. To this end, the authors argue for and utilize a structural approach-one that examines the ways in which the economy, education, the family, and the polity reflect and influence one another and help reinforce women's subordination. Only when these connections are brought to light is it possible to begin to formulate alternatives to conventional ideas concerning work, family, and gender roles. The authors begin by situating their research in opposition to dominant sociological models of work. They then provide a thorough historical overview of women at work, carefully examining the diversity of women's experiences by race, ethnicity, class, and age. Economic, legal, political, familial, and educational institutions are also analyzed to show the ways in which they help produce and maintain inequality for women in the workplace. Working Women in America: Split Dreams intersperses first-person accounts throughout the book and provides a number of vignettes of women employed in a variety of occupations. It is an ideal text for courses in women's studies, sociology, economics, social work, and history, and fascinating reading for anyone interested in women and their work.

Compared to other organizations within the criminal justice system, the world of corrections is hidden from public view, and therefore, quickly forgotten. However, like many of these male-dominated organizations, there are significant issues regarding gender and women's roles in the job. With the considerable lack of research regarding correctional officers within Canada and the relatively small percentage of women in the correctional workforce, it is vital to expand this topic to understand the complication of a gendered role. Research has shown gendered issues among female correctional officers and the lack of the support they may receive. With all these persistent issues, we ask ourselves, why do women continue a career path that appears to be working against them? More specifically, how does gender influence women's experience in long-term careers in corrections? To answer this, I conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with women who maintained long-term roles in Correctional Service Canada (CSC). This presentation will discuss these women's gendered experiences working within a masculine organization, how their gender affected their relationships and job expectations, and how CSC may view them.

Women in China are increasingly affected by HIV/AIDS. Current AIDS studies have examined the HIV risks faced by this gender group, paying inadequate attention to women's actual experiences with the disease. This oversight has inhibited our ability to understand the impact of gender on women's capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS in their postinfection lives. Based on a qualitative study on illness experiences of HIV-infected people, this article examines the interactions between HIV/AIDS and gender roles in the Chinese context. It was found that traditional gender norms have played a key role for HIV-infected women in their efforts to tackle this disease and to make sense of their daily lives. HIV infection has created a conflict between women's intention to fulfill their conception of "womanhood" and a decreased ability to do so, which, in turn, has adversely affected their self-perceptions and well-being. To avoid worsening the inequality women experience, therefore, we must also work on the socioeconomic conditions, for example, through delivering comprehensive care to affected families and developing a gender-sensitive welfare policy, so that the gender imparity that permeates this epidemic can be challenged and transformed.

The Female Burden Visualized: Cinematic Representation of Women during Epidemics

Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Anita Anthony Vanorsdal (bio) The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 340. $39.95 cloth; $38.99 ebook) [End Page 272] As Americans observe the centennial of the Great War, historians are exposing more about the lives of various actors in wartime mobilization and participation. Lynn Dumenil's history of American women's experiences during World War I provides both field experts and an interested general public an engaging narrative that encapsulates the political and cultural contexts, working lives, and national service opportunities that shaped women's abilities to contribute to the war effort. Dumenil weaves a carefully crafted synthesis of secondary sources on women's progressivism, wartime opportunities, political motivations, and personal desires to underscore her new avenues of research on what the war meant for American women in particular. While her focus is on "the way in which diverse women used the war for their own agendas of expanding their opportunities, sometimes economic ones, sometimes political, sometimes personal," she arranges her chapters to expose how women sought opportunities while encountering challenges from employers and unions, military and government policies, and cultural components that hindered their activism (p. 4). Dumenil does an exemplary job at weaving her new research and theories with a wide variety of secondary sources and reveals the nuances in women's lives that both helped and hindered their wartime participation. She employs a variety of contemporaneous accounts from newspapers, magazines, personal correspondence, films, photographs, and wartime posters alongside official government documents and war committees' reports to reveal that women's hopes for substantial long-term changes in politics, military service, professional advancement, and work opportunities would not last long after the armistice in November 1918. Dumenil does emphasize, however, that although long-term advancement in women's opportunities was not accomplished, the war did help to accelerate changes for women that would impact later generations during the New Deal and in the women's movement of the 1970s. While Dumenil's epilogue does provide an excellent explanation of the First World War's short-term impact on American women, [End Page 273] she does not offer much information on the state and local laws passed during the war, such as mothers' pensions, food benefits, state-supported health care for women and children, which shaped many women's daily lives into the 1920s and 1930s. She does a careful job of delineating the differences among women by class and race (concentrating on white and black women's different experiences), but leaves this reader desiring more information on how age, regional location, access to technological improvements, and club membership may have also segregated women and altered their wartime opportunities. Dumenil does underscore, however, that class and race shaped women's wartime experiences and activism, and she presents a careful analysis of the different ways gender dynamics complicated class and race. While focusing her analysis on racial and class divisions during the war, she also explores some of the subcategories that splintered politically active women in the 1920s and uses these experiences to highlight the lack of long-term change. Dumenil does an excellent job of providing a nuanced understanding of women's wartime experiences, including the political divisions among women, traditional gender role issues that were under siege during the war, economic concerns and the expansion of women's work opportunities, women who served overseas as nurses and aid workers for Allied soldiers, and the depictions of wartime women in popular culture. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of wartime experiences of American women, Dumenil offers a more complete, and more complex, view of women's war experiences that also offers potential for further research by scholars who seek to understand the Great War's impact on Americans, especially American women. [End Page 274] Anita Anthony Vanorsdal ANITA ANTHONY VANORSDAL recently completed her PhD at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on the Woman's Committee for the Council of National Defense and women's social welfare activism during the Great War...