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October 2018 Vol. 56 No. 2

Across edited chapters, using the framework of liberation psychology, the authors of Women’s Human Rights weave together a powerful, complex, and unifying conceptualization of women’s human rights violations as well as a call for social change. Their core position is this: in order to advance women’s human rights, psychology must be integrated with feminist activist scholarship and grassroots community action to transform structural inequities that violate these rights. While feminist psychology offers well-developed models for advancing social justice, practitioners and social psychologists are often absent from activism and from activist scholarship in the women's human rights field. The authors, advocating for prioritizing the voices of oppressed women around the globe, emphasize the overlapping experiences of poverty and gender-based violence. These violations of women’s human rights, presented from sociological and political science perspectives, are discussed in terms of resistance, liberation, and justice. A case is made for the use of participatory action research, as this flattens hierarchies and enables the collaborative co-creation of insights among researchers and the women who know firsthand the impacts of human rights violations. 

--L. J. Rubin, Texas Woman's University

Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and professionals.