Rural Development in the United States presents a comprehensive evaluation of the economic, environmental, and political implications of past rural development and a thorough consideration of the directions in which future development efforts should go. The authors have assembled the best of what is being thought and done with regard to rural development in the United States, and place it in a broad theoretical, historical, and geographical context. The book provides:
"The premise of mainstreaming gender is to bring equality concerns into every aspect of policy-making, and this brave book offers a close look at how feminists have taken up the challenge to transform the hidden dynamics of male domination in agricultural policy in Europe. In contrast to the automatic assumption that (neo)liberal policy always works against women’s interests, Prügl demonstrates the potential for feminist ju-jitsu to take advantage of multiple levels of governance to empower women in some circumstances. Although feminists were not always successful, the story of their efforts to remake agricultural policy should encourage activists to look for points of leverage in this and other contested and changing multilevel power systems."
---Myra Marx Ferree, University of Wisconsin
"Information on policy development, conflicts about improving the status of farm women, and using rural development policies to foster gender equality is hard to access in English and extremely useful for researchers concerned with the specifics of gender equality policy in the EU."
---Alison Woodward, Institute for European Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
"This book is a must-read for scholars interested in the gendered process of global restructuring. Elisabeth Prügl succeeds superbly in teasing out the power politics involved in European agricultural policy. Through the lens of a feminist-constructivist approach, she makes visible the multiple mechanisms of gendered power within the state. This very lucid narrative is a milestone in a new generation of feminist theoretical scholarship."
---Brigitte Young, University of Muenster, Germany
Taking West and East Germany as case studies, Elisabeth Prügl shows how European agricultural policy has cemented long-standing gender-based inequalities and how feminists have used liberalization as an opportunity to challenge such inequalities. Through a comparison of the EU’s rural development program known as LEADER as it played out in the Altmark region in the German East and in the Danube/Bavarian Forest region in the West, Prügl provides a close-up view of the power politics involved in government policies and programs.
In identifying mechanisms of power (refusal, co-optation, compromise, normalization, and silencing of difference), Prügl illustrates how these mechanisms operate in arguments over gender relations within the state. Her feminist-constructivist approach to global restructuring as a gendered process brings into view multiple levels of governance and the variety of gender constructions operating in different societies. Ultimately, Prügl offers a new understanding of patriarchy as diverse, contested, and in flux.
Jacket photograph: © iStockphoto.com/Wojtek Kryczka
The Two-Headed Household is an ethnographic account of gender relations and intrahousehold decisionmaking as well as a policy-oriented study of gender and development in the indigenous Andean community of Chanchalo, Ecuador. Hamilton’s main argument is that the households in these farming communities are “two-headed.” Men and women participate equally in agricultural production and management, in household decisionmaking, and share in the reproductive tasks of child care, food preparation, and other chores.
Based on qualitative fieldwork and regional household survey data, this book investigates the effect on women's lives of gender bias in agricultural development programs and labor and commodities markets. Despite household economic reliance on these programs and markets, there is extraordinary evidence of social and economic gender equality. Traditional Andean kinship structures enable women and men to enter marriage as materially equal partners.
As seen in case studies of five women and their families, the author continually encounters joint decisionmaking and shared household and agricultural responsibilities. In fact, it often seems that women have the final say in many decisions. There is the belief that a dynamic balance of power between male and female heads provides an impetus toward mutually desired economic and social goals. Despite the strong influence of the patriarchal power of the hacienda system, Andean gender ideology accords women and men equal measures of physical, mental, and emotional fortitude. The belief that maintaining traditional forms of economic collaboration helped them survive on the hacienda was reinforced under the economic and political domination of the patriarchal systems of the landed elite, church, and state.
Today, these people are proud of their strong women, strong families, and community solidarity which they believe distinguishes them from Ecuadorean and American societies. Hamilton suggests that women in developing countries should not be viewed as simply, or even inevitably, victims of gender-biased structural or cultural institutions. They may resist male bias, perhaps even with the support of local-level institutions. The Two-Headed Household demonstrates that analysis of gender relations should focus on forms of cooperation among women and men, as well as on forms of conflict, and will be of interest to scholars and students in anthropology, gender and development, and Latin American Studies.
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