Abstract
Women Confronting Natural Disaster: From Vulnerability to Resilience offers a comprehensive understanding of the unique and often overlooked experience of women confronting disasters. The author offers a synthesis of disaster research, from a sociological lens, from 1990 to 2010, which includes academic papers, governmental and nongovernmental reports as well as personal narratives and other types of “gray” literature. The book, through its use of “empirical retelling” of women’s stories, aims to identify how gender and privilege are specifically related to disaster and that the existing gender gap in the literature yields negative consequences for the most vulnerable in our society.
While this book emanates from the synthesis of disaster studies within sociology, social workers will recognize and appreciate the underpinning of human rights and social justice in the author’s utilization of the systemic and ecological perspectives in furthering our understanding of the how and why of gender relations in disasters and disaster management. The reader is asked to reconceptualize the work of disaster and risk management to allow for the intersection of race, class, socioeconomic status, gender, employment, physical and mental illnesses with disaster and postdisaster efforts and policies.
While the author addresses the postdisaster challenges for women mainly from an American perspective, she does offer nonwestern experiences to illuminate the failure to assess and interpret gender in the experience of disaster from what she posits is a “calculated blindness.”
This book is divided into 12 chapters and focuses on four major events in the field of disaster studies: Hurricane Andrew, 1992, Upper Midwest floods, 1997, the 9/11 attacks, and the Gulf Storm of 2005 (preliminary data from the BP oil spill, 2010, as well as other international disasters are also offered). The first two chapters offer an understanding of disaster sociology and the unique female experience as seen through art, film, and journalism. Chapter 3 poses significant questions, first about gender theory through her use of “how” this core body of knowledge frames disaster studies and second with contemporary feminist theories that illuminate the different ways women confront the everyday realities in emergencies and catastrophes in the use of the question “why”? Chapters 4–9 tackle the “gendered terrain of disaster as seen through the women’s eyes” by examining risk, vulnerability, reproductive, physical and mental health, safety, and intimacy. Chapter 10 highlights the strengths perspective in its identification of women’s resources and skills that they call upon to respond to “social crises of all kinds” on both an individual and collective level. This understanding further supports the call for women’s leadership in disasters management and response. The final two chapters highlight both the obstacles and supports of gender mainstreaming. The author offers practical steps in the professionalization of emergency management practitioners from her work in Canada. She ends with a call for more disaster research and more conversation about reducing the risk of disaster and to understand this as a feminist project, a women’s issue, and one she posits “American women are poised to lead.”
Enarson writes this book with students, practitioners, first responders, policy makers, and scholars in mind. She offers both case studies and pragmatic recommendations for proactive and gender-sensitive responses to reducing the risk of disaster. Women Confronting Natural Disaster: From Vulnerability to Resilience is a call to action for women and society to recognize women as the “key actors in building a safer, more just, and more disaster resilient future.”