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.