On the Road to Social Justice: Assessing Cairo
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Development. Copyright © 1999 The Society for International Development. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi), 1011-6370 (199903) 42:1; 100–103; 007365.
Feature Book Review
On the Road to Social Justice: Assessing Cairo WENDY HARCOURT
Women, Population and Global Crisis: A Political-economic Analysis. Asoka Bandarage, Zed Books, London, 1997. ISBN 1-85649-428-4. Population and Reproductive Rights: Feminist Perspectives from the South. Sonia Corrêa in collaboration with Rebecca Reichmann, Zed Books, London, 1994. ISBN 1-85649-284-2. Population and Development. Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (eds), Earthscan, London, 1998. ISBN 1-85383-275-8. Negotiating Reproductive Rights: Women’s Perspectives Across Countries and Cultures. Rosalind P. Petchesky and Karen Judd for the International Reproductive Rights Research Action Group (IRRRAG), Zed Books, London, 1998. ISBN 1-85649-536-1. Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control (rev.) Betsy Hartmann, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1995. ISBN 1-89608-491-4. Coping with Population Challenges. Louise Lassonde, Earthscan, London, 1996. ISBN 1-85383-420-3. Empowerment and Women’s Health. Jane Stein: Zed Books, London, 1997. ISBN 1-85649-464-0. Creating a New Consensus on Population. Jyoti Shankar Singh, Earthscan, London, 1998. ISBN 1-85383-565-X. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo in September 1994, has generated millions of words. This brief review
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Harcourt: Feature Book Review focuses on just a handful of books that are useful in an assessment of Cairo’s success in shifting the population debate from one of demographic targets and numbers to the promotion of reproductive health and rights and women’s empowerment. The books are written from both within and outside the Cairo process. We begin with the unashamedly celebratory viewpoint of Jyoti Shankar Singh (1998), Executive Coordinator of the Conference, moving to leading women NGO protagonists – Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era’s (DAWN) Sonia Corrêa (1994) and Betsy Hartmann (1995) and the collection edited by Rosalind Petchesky and Karen Judd – deeply involved books that were published around the time of Cairo, and on to the passionate though slightly removed post-Cairo analysis of Asoka Bandarage (1997). In Louise Lassonde (1996) we have a cool appraisal of AngloSaxon biases of Cairo along with the slightly baffling attempts by Jane Stein (1997) to pull health and women’s empowerment together. Finally, there is the compendium of articles by the ‘great and the good’ international population experts edited by Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (1998). If one could select a core message running through most of these books it is that Cairo very successfully placed reproductive health and rights squarely on the international population agenda along with the issue of women’s empowerment. It is also agreed that this success was achieved thro
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