Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights

Extract

Global Prescriptions: Gendering Health and Human Rights. By Rosalind Pollack Petchesky. New York: Zed Books, 2003. 320p. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.

In her book, Rosalind Petchesky sets herself the ambitious task of analyzing the development and impact of transnational movements for women's health in the last two decades of the twentieth century. She examines them not only in relation to the changing concepts of human rights and major United Nations conferences, but within the broader political and economic context of the spread of neoliberalism, religious fundamentalisms, the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and militarism. Originally commissioned by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development for a five-year review of the World Summit for Social Development, the book assumes a fair degree of sophistication in regard to transnational politics although the text is punctuated by short boxes that give readers a useful introduction to key policy developments.