Casey Ready, an academic and the executive director of a non-profit
organization, combines the personal and the political to tackle some
of the most pressing issues of our time: What is neoliberalism? How
does it harm women? And what can be done about it? Her book begins by
looking at how three YWCA women’s shelters in Ontario were affected
by Premier Mike Harris’s “Common Sense Revolution,” which
emphasized personal responsibility over collective responsibility, cut
social assistance by almost 22 percent, and reduced funding to
organizations that helped vulnerable people. The staff and clients of
the three YWCA shelters expected their situation to improve,
materially and politically, when Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal
government came to power. Instead, they found themselves responding to
new challenges: a government that appeared more supportive but, in
practice, built on its predecessor’s neoliberal policies, including
trying to control the shelters’ organizational structures and
services and to neutralize the language used to describe violence
against women. In the process, Ready reveals, “they did little to
address the poverty and marginalization of women and did much to
control and weaken non-profit organizations working to empower
women.” Drawing on interviews with forty-one shelter staff, clients,
volunteers, and activists, Shelter in a Storm exposes the dangers for
women that are embedded in neoliberal policies and reveals the value
of revitalizing feminism to counteract this powerful ideology.
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Revitalizing Feminism in Neoliberal Ontario
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780774832601
Publisert
2021
Utgiver
University of British Columbia Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter