Women and Power : Fighting Patriarchy and Poverty

This work sets out to throw light on empowerment by showing how women can and do take power into and over their own lives.

In exploring the achievements of rural Mexican women, the authors demonstrate how it is often poor women in poor countries who are celebrating new powers and changing their own lives rather than the more obvious beneficiaries of women's liberation in the North.

Power is dealt with in everyday terms: how power is gained or lost through working with others; how women's lives are defined or constrained by the power of the state, family or religion; how self-empowerment can transform personal relations; and the effects of power conferred from without.

The book puts the power back into "development", for activists, for workers in NGOs and for women's studies, in rich as well as poor countries.