Book Reviews 135

studies. On the other hand it is still th’e case that rather little has been achieved in the specific field of collective consumption, despite the fact that governments in many advanced industrial societies are attempting drastic cut-backs in this type of provision. Pinch’s demand for further research on the factors and processes affecting different levels of collective consumption was written in the mid-1980s. Developments since have given his pleas even greater urgency.

REFERENCES

Castells, M., The Urban Question, Arnold, London, 1983.

Massey, D., Spntial Divisions of Labour. Macmillan, London, 1984.

Urry, J., “Social Relations, Space and Time”, in: Social Relations and Spatial Structures, Gregory, D. and Urry, J. (Editors). Macmillan, London, 1985.

Peter Dickens University of Sussex, UK

J.H. MOM~EN and J. TOWNSEND, Geography of Gender in the Third World. Hutchinson Education, London, 1987, 424 pp.

‘We’ve come a long way, baby!’ Geography of Gender opens by quoting this line from a 1982 poem by Peggy Antrobus and the book itself is one of the key indications of that progress. Gender is now beginning to be taken seriously by geographers. Geography of Gender in the Third World is the second book from the Women and Geography group of the Institute of British Geographers -the group that has been so influential in marking out the ground and setting off on the long haul to make women visible to geographers and gender relations part of the academic content of the discipline.

Geography of Gender is a collection of papers, some of which were originally given at a Women and Geography Group conference in 1984 and others which were commissioned for the book to give a representative coverage of the range of work being undertaken in the general area of women and development in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The authors of the papers work in a range of institutions and situations in North America and Western Europe as well as in the Third World.

The book is divided into six major sections. Following section one which both sets the context and attempts to define what a geography of gender should look like, there are five series of essays ranging widely across the developing world. In section two - “Survival” - sex ratios, health and malnutrition in Asia are discussed. In section three - “Agriculture gender and capitalist penetration” - women’s labour in different parts of Africa and in Latin America is described, followed by a fourth section on “Labour reserve regions” ranging from Lesotho, through Columbia to northern Thailand. Section five then shifts the focus of discussion to questions about women’s roles in industrialis- ation in Mexico, Brazil and Sri Lanka.

Part six is headed, perhaps misleadingly, “Research directions in gender” but the hoped-for synthesis that I was beginning to look for failed to materialise. Each substantive part of the reader is prefaced with an editors’ introduction which sets the scene and draws out the main threads of the argument in each section. In their introduction to this final section the authors recognise that, while the book has admirably demonstrated the complexity and variety in women’s lives and in social relations between women and men throughout the Third World, the papers have done little to assist in identifying the commonalities and even, more importantly, ways of conceptualising and theorising women’s oppression. unfortunately, part six does not address this problem, but rather consists of a further series of papers - six in total ranging across a study of rural technology in India, development strategies in Egypt,

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Caribbean agriculture, the transformation of Malay family structures and a final paper calling for research on the proletarianisation process and women workers. Each chapter individually makes a case for particular new research directions but as a whole they fail to set out a coherent strategy for the future development of a geography of gender in the Third World. This is not to deny the very real strengths of each part of the book in providing a mass of detailed and fascinating information about women’s everyday experiences and the structures of oppression in different parts of the world. The case studies will prove valuable resources for teaching and this role of the book is further enhanced by the addition of a comprehensive bibliography and an excellent list of suggestions for further reading. It seems cavalier to ask for yet more but, as the authors’ themselves remark, geographers have been slow off the mark in analysing the geography of gender, whereas feminist scholars working in development economics and anthropol- ogy have been writing about gender relations for longer. In these areas there have been significant theoretical advances in the context of a growing literature that has begun to question and reconceptualise key theoretical concepts and debates in the area of women and development. In Chapter 1, as well as in the final part of the book, I had hoped to see detailed discussion of alternative theoretical perspectives and of the links between theory, research and practice. Very short introductions to some of the possible explanations of women’s subordination are included in Chapter 1 but they really are too brief to be very useful. However, the Chapter does make clear, as does the fascinating collection of case studies that follow it, that geographers have a vital part to play in the description and explanation of man’s inhumanity to woman. As well as describing the variety and similarities in women’s experience of oppression and the struggles against it, a geography of gender must also show how spatial variation is a key element in the construction and reconstruction of gender, of the definition of femaleness itself and begin to build up an understanding of how these variations are created, altered, exploited and challenged in the processes of development and change.

Linda McDowell The Open University, UK

H. PETER OBERLANDER, Human Settlement Zssues 7, Lund: The Central Human Settlement Issue. University of British Columbia Press, 1985, 103 pp.

As this series intends, this overview provides a collation of a wide range of material from across the world. This does not achieve a clutter, but rather presents a clear synthesis. Crucial in this is material from the United Nations, and several key studies, including Trivelli’s Access to Lund by the Poor, and Yahya’s African Experience, in the Human Settlement series reviewed here. It is a short and smoothly written book whose power rests on the author’s commitment to using a clear analysis (that spurns academic problematics) to gear-up government policy. As such, it needs to be read by anyone with an open mind on policy (and even more by those who don’t): students will, of course, find enlightenment too.

In this, some key points emerge. The issue of government programmes is familiarly criticised for its delay and insensitivity, even when well-intentioned; the now familiar emphasis on self help is right (in any case one third of the homes in the Third World are provided in this way), and the author couples this with the need for rights for tenants where large government programmes are underway. The acknowledged complications of squatting are contrasted against the unique power it gives, in some recognition of human rights. The regularisation of tenure is often unwelcome to squatters, which is not surprising given the terms on which they have to achieve accord with the systems. Third, the book emphasises the need to support self help, “community action” with technical