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LEEDER, Elaine. THE FAMILY IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE: A GENDERED JOURNEY. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. 305pages, soft cover $43.95.
Introductory family textbooks often seem to have been written with the goal of being as much as possible like most other introductory family textbooks. The Leeder book, although it deals with standard topics for introductory family courses, offers a gendered, global perspective that provides much that is fresh, new, and stimulating. It is interesting and teachable and opens up many valuable pedagogical possibilities.
The book is rich in discussions of gender intersecting with family. One can read in it about patriarchy, violence against women, gender selective abortion and infanticide, gender differences in domestic workload, gender differences in pay, women as victims in war, rape, gender in old age, gender and sibling relationships, and much more. The book advocates a critical consciousness and provides basic ideas of standpoint theory, feminist theory, and conflict theory in order to illuminate gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other diversity issues in relationship to families.
The book offers much information about global diversity in family experience. It...