Dont Marry Me to a Plowman or Restoring Responsibility

Don't Marry Me to a Plowman!: Women's Everyday Lives in Rural North India

Author: Patricia Jeffery

Popular Western images of Indian women range from submissive brides behind their veils to the powerful, active women of Indian politics. In this lively and unique book, Patricia and Roger Jeffery present a different perspective on women’s lives. Focusing on the mundane rather than the exotic, they explore the complex interplay between the power of social structures to constrain individuals and the ways women negotiate these constraints to carve out places for themselves.Based on information collected by the authors during their research in villages in Bijnor District, western Uttar Pradesh, the volume offers eight life histories of Hindu and Muslim women. The women’s life histories present a variety of class positions and domestic circumstances, illustrating many aspects of north Indian village life. Interspersed with thematic discussions composed of dialogues, episodes, and songs, the life histories deal with topics of vital concern for women in rural north India: the birth of children, worries about dowry, arranging weddings, sexual politics in marriage, relationships with in-laws, relationships with natal kin, and widowhood.

Look this: American Gospel or Warthog

Restoring Responsibility: Ethics in Government, Business and Healthcare

Author: Dennis F Thompson

Dennis Thompson argues for a more robust conception of responsibility in public life than prevails in contemporary democracies. Thompson suggests that we stop thinking about public ethics in terms of individual vices (such as selfishness or sexual misconduct) and start thinking about it in terms of institutional vices (such as abuse of power and lack of accountability).

Table of Contents:

Introduction;

Part I. Demands of Institutional Politics:

1. The moral responsibility of public officials: the problem of many hands;
2. Ascribing responsibility to advisers in government;
3. Bureaucracy and democracy;
4. Judicial responsibility: the problem of many minds;
5. Representatives in the welfare state;

Part II. Varieties of Institutional Failure:
6. Democratic secrecy: the dilemma of accountability;
7. Mediated corruption: the case of the Keating Five;
8. Election time: normative implications of temporal properties of the electoral process in the US;
9. Hypocrisy and democracy;
10. Private life and public office;

Part III. Extensions of Institutional Responsibility:
11. Restoring distrust: the ethics of oversight;
12. The institutional turn in professional ethics;
13. Hospital ethics;
14. Understanding financial conflicts of interest in medicine;
15. The privatization of business ethics;
16. Democratic theory and global society.