Ebook: Women and children first : feminism, rhetoric, and public policy

The essays in this book analyze the rhetoric of a wide
range of American and Canadian public policies that propose "to put
women and children first." They uncover a logic of paternalistic treatment
of women and children that purports to protect them but almost
always also disempowers them and sometimes harms them. This logic is
widespread in contemporary policy discourse, and it affects how people
understand, and respond to, those policies and the problems they are
meant to address. Cultural discourse shapes, and is shaped by, both academic
and public policy discourses.