Gender studies: women

Drawing on interviews with welfare-reliant single mothers living in the South Wales Valleys, this original book charts their interactions with the labour market and welfare state. It challenges current understandings of welfare eligibility and dependency and provides valuable new policy insights for welfare reform.

Despite being a widely recognised phenomenon, PMS remains difficult to define clinically, with no universally agreed diagnostic criteria or shortlist of deterministic symptoms. This book aims to accurately define and explain cyclical experiences and debunk the myth of the hysterical female, once and for all.

This interdisciplinary collection addresses women's under-representation in science across Europe, focusing on physics and its gender imbalance. Emphasising social perspectives over biological explanations, it evaluates policy solutions and shares personal life stories, providing key insights into the physics world.

This book explores the experiences of people affected by Ireland's constitutional abortion ban. Through in-depth research and interviews, the author uncovers how the 8th Amendment led women and gestating people live their bodies as "future aborting bodies," and how the need to ‘prepare’ for crisis pregnancies shaped everyday practices.

This book recaptures the buried history of the household science movement, including domestic science teaching, public health, higher education for women and the scientific content and aims of domestic science courses.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence digitally

This book explores the link between government debt and women's rights. Experts highlight how economic policies worsen gender inequalities and propose a feminist approach to debt issues. It is an essential resource for comprehending the intricate connection between economics and gender.

Drawing on 20 years of ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, Brazil and India, this book highlights the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance.

The role that nurseries play in supplementing family care is an important subject – but in the UK, there is currently little consensus about what nurseries should provide, how they should be run, and who should pay for them. In this book, Helen Penn asks: is there a more considered way ahead?

This book shows how the speech and syntax of low-income female teachers in India’s education system establishes a special form of relational agency and empowerment.

This timely book addresses an overlooked area of criminal justice by focusing on the reality of pregnancy and new motherhood in prison. Based on the experiences of women in mother and baby units, it passionately argues the case for minimising harm, making key reading for criminology and midwifery students and researchers.

Presenting in-depth accounts of North Korean women defectors living in the UK, this book examines how the harrowing experiences they endured and their utopian dream of a better future for fellow North Korean women have become an impetus for their activism.

Drawing on a wealth of qualitative longitudinal evidence, this book casts light on women’s lived experiences of welfare and work. It uncovers the hidden gendered bias of conditional welfare reforms to challenge dominant political discourses, policy design and practice norms.