ABSTRACT
What possible connections or similarities can there be between the unmarried corporate manager in Manhattan, the teenage farm wife in rural China, the nurse working in a New Guinea highland village and the worker on a micro-electronics assembly line in Seoul? A decade ago Western feminists, and indeed feminists elsewhere in the world, may well have answered:
They are all women and as such they receive less of their nation’s economic, political and cultural resources than do their menfolk. Furthermore, they suffer particular additional controls and burdens which men do not face. In particular women often lack bodily autonomy and are exposed to rape and other sexual violence or do not have control over their reproductive powers.
