Covering a wide range of topics, and dealing with real-life issues, these international contributors, who are both male and female and who cross a variety of boundaries--social, cultural, and political--examine various dimensions of women's lived experiences so that they might address the challenges that arise from women's contemporary struggles in relation to globalization, human rights, and a political economy.

Divided into four main sections, each section includes an introductory essay, and then each chapter recaps some of the history of the given issue before it goes on to examine its current status. Essay topics include: women in the workplace and their push toward wage equity; support for working mothers and the importance of universal, affordable childcare; women in academia and women in politics; aging as a gendered experience and why aging and women's activism matter and the importance of story-telling; the experiences of girls where the presence of feminism in their lives is, and has been, taken for granted; how women have been perceived by advertisers and how they have been represented in the media; the international sex trade, pornography and the question of men's responsibility; and women and human rights, both in a local, and in a global, context.

This is a first-rate book: comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and grounded in several disciplines. This compilation reports a multidimensional examination of western women's perspectives of and interventions in the labor force, as content, producers and consumers of cultural industries, in human rights, and politics. The chapters go beyond the scope of one country as they relate to realities in Canada, the United States, and Great Britain.
--Dr. Leen d'Haenens, Department of Communication, Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium)/Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

In this book Jeffery Klaehn has assembled some of the most cogent writers on issues of justice, gender and media in a collection of essays that helps us connect the struggles of everyday life with those of global proportions. Exploring themes of desire, sexuality and commodification across boarders, boundaries and human bodies, these essays unmask the powerful forces that shapes our lives and map the pathways for new directions.
--Robin Andersen, Director of Peace and Justice Studies at Fordham University and author of A Century of Media, A Centruy of War, and Consumer Culture and TV Programming

Roadblocks to Equality engages timely critical issues of concern to women across a variety of social, cultural and political boundaries. The collection provides important scholarly interventions addressing the challenges that arise from women's contemporary struggles in relation to globalization, human rights and political economy and perhaps more importantly, considers the possibilities of resistance and hope for transformative futures.
--Jasmin Zine, Dept. of Sociology, Wilfrid Laurier University

It is heartening to see women--and men--boldly address persistent gender inequities in contemporary lives, refashioned by complex political, economic, and cultural economies emerging in the twenty-first century. With perceptual acuity and feminist insight, the essays in Roadblocks to Equality implicitly recognize the battles won and possibilities the future holds.
--Jyotika Virdi, Communication Studies, University of Windsor

Table of Contents

Contributors include: Patrizia Albanese, Susan Bryant, Walter DeKeseredy, Natalie Dias, Peter Eglin, Danielle Fagen, Kathleen Gotts, Sylvia Hale, Mandy Hall, Robert Jensen, Jeffery Klaehn, Michèle Martin, Claudia Mitchell, Michael Parenti, Richard Poulin, Jocey Quinn, Jacqui Reid-Walsh, Carole Roy, Martin D. Schwartz, Nancy Snow.

JEFFERY KLAEHN, PhD, teaches with the departments of Cultural Studies and Sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario. He is the editor of Filtering the News: Essays on Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model (2005), of Bound By Power: Intended Consequences (2006), and Inside the World of Comic Books (2006).

256 pages, 6x9, index Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55164-316-8 $19.99 Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-55164-317-5 $48.99 Women's Studies Sociology May 2008

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