Caroline Moser

Born amid the upheaval of war-time London, Caroline Moser went on to become a ground-breaking feminist anthropologist. In this memoir she explores the beginnings of her outsider roots through her grandmothers, a fearless Boer War nurse, and a caring Quaker. She charts her journey, from childhood under apartheid in 1950s Cape Town to documenting political oppression in 1960s South America, making TV films about Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro. Living with her two young sons in a bamboo house in an Ecuadorian slum alongside local women, consolidated her feminist identity. Working in academia and as a trainer, was when she invented gender planning, a feminist framework still used by development practitioners today. Moser’s swan song came in Washington DC in the 1990s at the World Bank where she challenged conventional orthodoxy on the impact of their economic policies on poverty and gender inequalities. Caroline Moser always felt an outsider, looking in, as she fought the challenges confronting women determined to forge professional careers and independent lives. In this memoir she explores how her outsider identity has empowered her to wade in, defy injustices, oppose gender inequalities and develop alternative solutions. This is not a misery memoir; rather it explores a powerful personal, professional and political journey through childhood, marriage, divorce and single motherhood alongside an unorthodox career in international development.

Gender planning is not an end in itself but a means by which women, through a process of empowerment, can emancipate themselves. Ultimately, its success depends on the capacity of women's organizations to confront subordination and create successful alliances which will provide constructive support in negotiating women's needs at the level of household, civil society, the state and the global system. Gender Planning and Development provides an introduction to an issue of primary importance and constant debate. It will be essential reading for academics, practitioners, undergraduates and trainees in anthropology, development studies, women's studies and social policy.

Latin America is both the world's most urbanized fastest developing regions, where the links between social exclusion, inequality and violence are clearly visible. The banal, ubiquitous nature of drug crime, robbery, gang and intra-family violence destabilizes countries' economies and harms their people and social structures. Encounters with Violence & Crime in Latin America explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Columbia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses pioneering new methods of participatory urban appraisal to ask local people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs of consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. This gives voice to those whose daily lives and dominated by widespread aggression, and provides important new insights for researchers and policy-makers.

Latin America is both the world's most urbanized fastest developing regions, where the links between social exclusion, inequality and violence are clearly visible. The banal, ubiquitous nature of drug crime, robbery, gang and intra-family violence destabilizes countries' economies and harms their people and social structures. Encounters with Violence & Crime in Latin America explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Columbia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses pioneering new methods of participatory urban appraisal to ask local people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs of consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. This gives voice to those whose daily lives and dominated by widespread aggression, and provides important new insights for researchers and policy-makers.

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Gender planning is not an end in itself but a means by which women, through a process of empowerment, can emancipate themselves. Ultimately, its success depends on the capacity of women's organizations to confront subordination and create successful alliances which will provide constructive support in negotiating women's needs at the level of household, civil society, the state and the global system. Gender Planning and Development provides an introduction to an issue of primary importance and constant debate. It will be essential reading for academics, practitioners, undergraduates and trainees in anthropology, development studies, women's studies and social policy.