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Review from: American
Reference Books Annual 2006
Women’s Rights, the newest entry in Wilson's
popular The Reference Shelf series, provides articles about the
status of contemporary women around the world. In her introduction, editor
Curry argues that in the early twenty-first century, women are “treated,
to a greater or lesser extent, as the subordinates of men.” She notes that
although women comprise half of the world’s population and are responsible
for two-thirds of the world’s work, they earn one-tenth of the world’s
income and own one-hundredth of the world’s property. Chapters focus on
important global issues, including women in the public sphere, women’s
health care and mortality, violence against women, sex trafficking and
prostitution, Muslim women and the East-West divide, and Christian
fundamentalism versus reproductive rights. Articles selected from
high-profile magazines and newspapers demonstrate that women worldwide are
not granted the same rights as men. For instance, Afghan women are forced
into arranged marriages, women in Pakistan are murdered by their husbands
in legal honour killings, female fetuses are being aborted in large
numbers in China and India, and pharmacists in the United States sometimes
deny women legal birth control. Appendixes include lectures from Nobel
Laureates Shirin Ebadi and Wangari Maathai and the 2005 Gender Gap Index,
which measures the level of women’s equality in 58 countries. Women’s
Rights is essential for all women's
studies and human rights collections. |
