ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is an attempt to bring into focus, from a wide variety of research sources in quite different research traditions, some of the issues that policy makers are going to have to wrestle with in relation to the functions of women in modern society. Public policy with respect to women as wives and mothers, as consumers, as sex objects, or as workers, whether embedded in ukase or legislation, or implicit in the mores, has an ancient if not always an honorable history. The most revolutionary of all the changes involving the public interest which demand a re-examination of policy dealing with women are those concerned with the declining salience of the reproductive function of women and the technology that makes possible for an increasing proportion of women a divorce of reproduction from sexual relations.
