Since the end of the Second World War, race relations and immigration have become major subjects of debate in the political, social and cultural life of Britain. The presence of immigrants from Britain's former colonies and the subsequent arrival of economic migrants and asylum seekers have triggered discussion of many issues, not least those surrounding difference, assimilation, diversity and identity (Gilroy 1993). It is these particular issues (and the tensions that they engender), often articulated through the depiction of mother-daughter relationships, which are dramatized in the work of contemporary Black British female playwrights such as Winsome Pinnock, Trish Cooke, Paulette Randall, Maya Chowdry, J. B. Rose, Tanika Gupta, Rukhsana Ahmad, Jackie Kay, Grace Dayley, Jacqueline Rudet, Maria Oshodi and Zindika2. My thesis is thus about the construction of mother-daughter relationships as presented in the work of these playwrights. It places particular emphasis on how mothers and daughters negotiate their relationships, positions and identities in the context of their respective experiences as first- and second- generation female migrants in Britain.

This thesis centres on the perceptions of social work professionals involved in incest intervention in Taiwan. It is based on 39 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with respondents from three categories: social workers, social work supervisors and counsellors/therapists, from different regions of Taiwan, working in Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Prevention Centres. The gender distribution of the interviewees, 35 women and 4 men, reflects the numerical dominance of women in social work. This study shows that the majority of the respondents were assigned child protection work without consultation, reflecting the hierarchical decision-making process in Taiwanese social work, overriding staff autonomy, personal preferences and training background. Child protection work creates high pressure and necessitates joint decision making involving all related disciplines. Almost every worker interviewed felt a high level of stress and a need for support in dealing with incest/child sexual cases, perhaps due to insufficient knowledge and inadequate training. The shorter the time frame they face, the more mistakes they may make. I utilized two theoretical viewpoints, including family systems theory associated with pathological behaviours and feminist theory, to elucidate how interactions between gender and power contribute to gender inequality in intervention outcomes. My findings suggest that the current child protection procedure in Taiwan raises significant concerns. These include time-constraints in intervention and psychotherapy, the sequencing of the procedure, and lack of gender-awareness. It seems the hierarchical organisational structure directly and indirectly encourages social workers to be overreliant on their supervisors in decision-making. The relationship between the supervisor and supervisee is often inadequate, leading to many supervisees feeling undermined and discouraged from growing personally in confidence. My study found that no one particular intervention fits all cases and the therapeutic approach chosen will depend on the circumstances of the case, based on the therapist's training background, individual personality variations and experience. However, practitioners identified 'sensitivity: 'accompaniment' and 'empowerment' as effective and important. Radical changes in attitude, an incorporation of a feminist approach, a gender understanding work culture and a clear resolve to make positive changes in the fields of education, practice and reforms in legal and hierarchical structures may resolve some of the difficulties the present system of social work practice in incest faces.

Gender inequality is deeply entrenched in society. This continues to restrict women's opportunities in life and has also been widely seen as an obstacle to economic development. Wage employment is seen as important mechanism for empowering women, and also conferring benefits on the family and society as a whole. This thesis examines patterns of inequality in the food-processing and the textiles and garment industries in Ghana, the structural factors that are responsible for producing gender inequality and their impacts on the socio-economic advancement of women. Within the cross-sectoral case study, a comparative gender and social relation analysis was undertaken to explore the factors that determined the allocation of economic resources and nature of power relations within the labour market and the household. The study of occupational segregation, access to training, career advancement opportunities, decision-making authority and responsibilities, earnings and domestic responsibilities led to the conclusion that, comparatively, the majority of women do not have equal opportunities in the "feminised" food processing and textiles industries in relation to men. With some inter-sectoral variations, the disparity between men and women is also widened as a result of the influence of the size of firm. The processes are complex because they are intertwined with wider socio-demographic, cultural, economic, and legal elements. However, within this complex set of factors, employers' preference and taste for discrimination is arguments concerned with the issue most central to gender inequality in these industries. These preferences are based on the economic rationality of profit maximisation and production efficiency, which is in turn intertwined with the cultural stereotypes concerning men and women's abilities and their attitudes to work. Recommendations to address the structural inequalities which exist between men and women in these industries and in Ghanaian society as a whole are set out.

This thesis considers the Renaissance understanding of the virtue of chastity within the French court, countering the view that the Renaissance courtier perceived chastity to be simply an attribute properly assigned to women as a protective virtue. From within a context of Renaissance moral paradigms, religious and secular, this study demonstrates how the French nobility championed individual perfectibility and denounced passion, embracing reason as paramount moral virtue and valorizing social codes of conduct as signs of rational activity. The rational control of the body in a social context was perceived to be necessary to the smooth- running of the State, and this control was symbolically represented as 'chastity', being grounded upon principles of self-restraint familiar to women, who were nominally pre-eminent in this area of behaviour. Such an analysis informed the discourse of Perfect Love played out at court, in which a chaste female beloved stood as an icon of universal concord. Through her perfect status she induced a publicly chaste conduct in her lover, whose pursuit was rational and stabilizing to the social milieu. This 'chaste' game was a fiction which had little relevance to private morality, but was concerned with exhibiting chaste harmony to the public gaze. It exalted the female form as an icon of the purified social body, thereby bestowing symbolic control upon woman. This study also explores the extent to which the Renaissance noblewoman was a prisoner of her own corporeal nature within this chaste discourse of love. She was influential by reason of the sexual purity attributed to her, but precariously so, because her very sexuality risked the accusation that her real 'virtue' lay not in her purity, but in her dissimulation of desire.

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