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 so that they might address the challenges that arise from women's contemporary struggles in relation to globalization, human rights and their place in a political economy. Divided into four sections, each section includes an introductory essay, and then each chapter recaps some of the history of the given issue before going 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 and why aging and women's activism matter and the importance of story-telling; 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, both in a local, and in a global, context.