ABSTRACT
Awareness that gender shapes the ways in which people think about, experience and shape space and place has become widely acknowledged. The concept of gender was introduced into research to demonstrate how women’s and men’s lives are socially and culturally constructed, rather than immutably fixed by a dichotomous sexual division. A key insight of geographers studying gender is that spaces of action, once seen as separated into ‘private’ and ‘public’, the former associated with women, the latter with men, are integrated, fluid and contested. In the old coal-mining regions of rural Appalachia in the United States the distinctions between public and private spaces are also becoming increasingly blurred. Perhaps the most notable outcomes from the transnational women’s activism have been their successes in shifting the discourse, integrating gender perspectives into the documents that emerged from the UN conferences on the environment, population, and human rights.
