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The introductory chapter gives a more detailed introduction to the study and its aims and objectives. It briefly charts the recent progress of feminist scholarship to a more moderate stance, to a multidisciplinary — even minimalist — approach. In the context of the Creation and Fall, it touches on the problems of gender‐exclusive language, gender‐bias, male/female stereotypes, and the implications of monotheism, a linguistically gendered God and the attendant prejudices and preconceptions. It points out that, as a piece of Old Testament research, this study is something of a hybrid, comprising exegesis, literary criticism and reception history, and drawing together a number of hitherto discrete approaches. This also means that, along the way, many potentially fruitful explorations have had to be put aside in the interest of brevity and clarity.

This chapter examines the ways in which the relationship between law and gender has been theorized to date, set against the backdrop of an official position in which gender is not considered to be a category of theoretical significance in law. It identifies and explores a range of departures from this official position. It also discusses the development of a more complex understanding of the relationship between law and gender over time, in which the focus has gradually moved away from a conception of law as an unequivocal expression of masculine power towards an apprehension of law as implicated in the processes and performances through which gender come into effect, is fashioned and refashioned, contested and re-contested as an aspect of social ordering.

This introductory chapter discusses gender and immigration, especially the place of men and women in society. The first section is concerned with the arrival of immigration scholarship and gender studies during the 1980s and the 1990s. It shows that the development in immigration research was derived from a huge increase in literal human movement across borders during the late 20th century. The next sections examine the different stages of feminist scholarship, starting with the remedy for the exclusion of women in research. This is followed by a discussion of the second stage, which is the transition from “women and migration” to “gender and migration.” The third stage of feminist scholarship is presently emerging, and this is viewing gender as a constitutive element of immigration. The last sections of the chapter serve as a summary of the next chapters.

Throughout the twentieth century, the “woman’s wage” has existed separately from the “man’s wage,” even as the concept of the wage continues to be hotly debated. Feminist scholarship attempts to analyze wage as a gendered concept and argues for the dissolution of the distinction between a woman’s and man’s wage. It is an economic social custom that, due to various social interpretations, is open to change. This introduction notes the evolution of the phrase “woman’s wage” throughout the twentieth century in the United States, and ends with a brief description of each of the five essays.

The introduction presents the issue of sex workers’ rights and the movement in Africa through both first-hand examples and stories as well as historical, societal, and scholarly context. It also sets out the framework of the rest of the book, discusses the research methodology used, and explains how this book seeks to fill a void in both sex work studies and African feminist scholarship.

This chapter explores the topic of father‒daughter incest. After general comments on how the topic has been discussed in biblical and especially feminist biblical scholarship, cultural variability in defining incest is made clear. Next, investigation of apparent omission of the daughter in the incest laws of Leviticus 18 and 20 concludes that no explicit mention does not indicate sexual licence for fathers. The narrative of Lot and his daughters in Genesis 19 is then discussed, demonstrating the widespread claim of feminist interpreters that contemporary findings on father‒daughter incest apply also to antiquity. The narratives of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 and of Boaz and Ruth in the book of Ruth are brought into the discussion also. Finally, modern scientific findings on incest among humans and other higher primates are described to argue that the notion that first-degree incest in antiquity was as widespread as in the contemporary West is untenable.

This chapter focuses on Emmanuel Levinas' take on the feminine and maternity in his ethics, which feminist scholarship indicates as massively ambiguous. When studied as a descriptive phenomenology, Levinas' account may be used to justify women's submission and isolation in the home. There is an obvious appropriation of some patriarchal ideals in his philosophy; as he talks about femininity, he repeatedly fails to address women and their concerns. The damage is even worse when his explanation is read as a prescriptive ethics. Levinas affirms the need to care for the other, even to the point of self-abnegation—women are particularly vulnerable to oppression under this ideal. Apparently, Levinas is missing various critical components; these include a better understanding of ambiguous intersubjectivity, of how to balance asymmetrical relations, and of how ethical failure relates to ethical success.

This chapter considers some of the challenges of studying late antique Jewish women and their practices through a text composed and transmitted in male-dominated contexts. It describes how menstruation made meaning through difference and differentiation in the Hebrew Bible, ancient Judaism, and rabbinic Literature. The chapter reviews new approaches to understanding the Babylonian Talmud as situated between classical (Palestinian) rabbinic literature, on the one hand, and its Sasanian context, on the other. It then closely analyzes a story about a rabbi and a heretic recorded at b. Sanhedrin 37a to illustrate the book’s main hermeneutical assumptions and potentialities.

The introduction presents the issue of sex workers’ rights and the movement in Africa through both first-hand examples and stories as well as historical, societal, and scholarly context. It also sets out the framework of the rest of the book, discusses the research methodology used, and explains how this book seeks to fill a void in both sex work studies and African feminist scholarship.

This concluding chapter argues that the paradigm of transnational feminism provides a critical case study for the examination of the implications that transnational perspectives have for the way in which people make sense of the complex and deeply interconnected world. This is because transnational perspectives have sought to capture contemporary global phenomena that have unsettled modern nation-states, and also because such perspectives have been at the forefront of interdisciplinary knowledge that has grappled with the real material and political effects of people's knowledge practices. Indeed, transnational feminist scholarship has produced rich theoretical and empirical understandings of a wide range of sociocultural, political, and economic phenomena. Moreover, the most profound potential of interdisciplinary feminist scholarship has been its ability to interrogate its own complicities in the structures of the power it has sought to change.

This chapter provides a useful counterpoint, drawing on feminist scholarship to highlight the gendered nature of policy designed to tackle the evil of ‘idleness’. It points to the dilemma, unarticulated in the Beveridge reforms but an increasingly important one for policy makers, of how to treat women's paid and unpaid ‘work’ and contribution to the economy and well-being. It focuses particularly on the challenges posited by the rise in part-time working and lone parenthood, both notable by their absence from serious consideration in the Beveridge model but an increasingly salient feature of the contemporary social and economic organisation of society. It notes that the review of the limitations of the current welfare-to-work policies in tackling ‘idleness’ points to the continuing challenges facing policy makers.