ABSTRACT
It isn’t the purpose of an afterword to write a review, but I must start by saying why this book has been worth reading, because it is only honest to declare my sympathy with the whole project.
The theme is important, moving on from past discussion of literacies without a gender dimension and parallel discussions about women in social and economic change, to melding them together, with literacy as the linking topic. The book’s well organised structure (research; policy and programming; learning from experience) has created a unity which might have seemed unlikely, given a group of nineteen contributors from different national backgrounds and different professions. Perhaps because a shared gender perspective and a general acceptance of the validity of an ethnographic approach have provided a broadly common understanding, they have produced a tapestry and not just a patchwork (as usually happens with multi-authored works).
