Susan C. Bourque – författare

Pilar is a capable, energetic merchant in the small, Peruvian highland settlement of Chiuchin. Genovena, an unmarried day laborer in the same town, faces an impoverished old age without children to support her. Carmen is the wife of a prosperous farmer in the agricultural community of Mayobamba, eleven thousand feet above Chiuchin in the Andean sierra. Mariana, a madre soltera—single mother—without a husband or communal land of her own, also resides in Mayobamba.

These lives form part of an interlocking network that the authors carefully examine in Women of the Andes. In doing so, they explore the riddle of women’s structural subordination by analyzing the social, political, and economic realities of life in Peru. They examine theoretical explanations of sexual hierarchies against the backdrop of life histories. The result is a study that pinpoints the mechanisms perpetuating sexual repression and traces the impact of social change and national policy on women’s lives.

Pilar is a capable, energetic merchant in the small, Peruvian highland settlement of Chiuchin. Genovena, an unmarried day laborer in the same town, faces an impoverished old age without children to support her. Carmen is the wife of a prosperous farmer in the agricultural community of Mayobamba, eleven thousand feet above Chiuchin in the Andean sierra. Mariana, a madre soltera—single mother—without a husband or communal land of her own, also resides in Mayobamba.These lives form part of an interlocking network that the authors carefully examine in Women of the Andes. In doing so, they explore the riddle of women’s structural subordination by analyzing the social, political, and economic realities of life in Peru. They examine theoretical explanations of sexual hierarchies against the backdrop of life histories. The result is a study that pinpoints the mechanisms perpetuating sexual repression and traces the impact of social change and national policy on women’s lives.

In the last twenty-five years women have made remarkable progress in access to the classroom and broken new ground in educational opportunity, yet educational equity remains elusive and politically contested. The Politics of Women's Education: Perspectives from Asia, Africa, and Latin America collects essays that reveal the complex changes in women's education throughout the world and together offer the first comprehensive assessment of what has been attempted, what remains to be done, and what the options are for reform.The volume presents the voices of Third World women and men relating their efforts to improve the position of women through education. They raise important questions for readers from both high- and low-income countries, questions about whether formal or nonformal education will best serve women's needs; whether the state or private initiatives are most likely to succeed in raising women's status through the delivery of transforming knowledge; and whether Western dreams of modernization have any relevance to non-Western societies.A diversity of countries is covered, including India, Pakistan, Korea, the Philippines, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil. Each contributor locates the issues surrounding women's education in the larger national context, thus unraveling the matrix that links gender and education to race, ethnicity, social class, and political change. Two essays offer analysis of the worldwide movement for women's education froma comparative perspective and raise fundamental questions about the relevance of the educational models, approaches, and assumptions currently in use.