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Sarah Buscher and Bettina Ling.
New York: Feminist Press. 1999.
BY MARIE HAMMOND CALLAGHAN
Although women's peace movement history is largely marginalised within the academe and general media, occasional efforts are made to highlight the peace-building work of individual women considered to have risen from "ordinary" circumstances to meet "extraordinary" challenges. In a series entitled "Women Changing the World," Nobel Peace Prize winners Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams take their place as two of the world's "global leaders for human rights" as well as becoming role models to "inspire future world-changers." Prefaced by Charlotte Bunch (founder and executive director of the Center for Women's Global Leadership at Rutgers University, U.S.A.) the feminist perspective guiding the book is clearly laid out. She asserts that, regardless of global cultural and social differences, "women often share similar problems and concerns about issues such as violence in their lives and in the world, or the kind of environment we are creating for the future."
This dual biography by authors Buscher and Ling provides a brief but engaging narrative of the Corrigan/Williams stories focusing on their family influences and the conditions they faced in their communities in violent political conflict. Largely descriptive in style, the main focus of the book is to explain how their lives became intertwined through a tragic accident which took the lives of the McGuire children in West Belfast and led to their founding of the Peace Women/Peace People in August, 1976. Attractively formatted and written in highly accessible language, the target audience appears to be American secondary/high school (especially female?) students. In this sense, it represents a pioneering (and laudable) effort to make women's peace history visible,...