Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible is an attempt to respond to the need for deep and lasting social change in an epoch of dangerous crisis for all humans, cultures, and the planet. Featuring articles by well-known feminist activists and academics, this book points to ways to re-create the connections, which have been severed, between the gift economy, women, and the economies of Indigenous peoples, and to bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet. Shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another, better, world possible.

A gift economy embodies an oriented logic of care while exchange, upon which the market is based, contains a logic of self interest because it requires an equivalent return for what is given, satisfying the need of the ‘giver’ as opposed to those of the ‘receiver.’ Indigenous societies often continue to practice gift giving although they have now been forced into the context of the market. Many other examples of gift giving from mothering to communication and social activism abound in our society although they are unrecognized. Even free housework can be considered an unrecognized gift women are giving to their families and to the capitalist system. Through the commodification of free gift areas—such as water, traditionally grown seeds, medicinal plants—globalization captures the gifts of the many in the Global South, channeling them to the few in the North. Contributors to this volume argue that shifting to a gift paradigm can give us the radically different worldview which will make another world possible.

Genevieve Vaughan has been working for many years on the idea of a gift economy founded on mothering and being mothered as the basis of an alternative worldview and way of life. She created the international all-women activist Foundation for a Compassionate Society based in Austin, Texas (1987-2005). She also initiated a network: International Feminists for a Gift Economy (2001 to present) whose members give presentations on the gift economy at conferences worldwide. Genevieve lives part time in Rome, Italy, and part time in Austin, Texas. Her published books include For-Giving: A Feminist Criticism of Exchange (1997); Homo Donans (2007); and The Gift in the Heart of Language (2015). She has edited two anthologies The Gift/ il Dono: A Feminist Analysis (2004) and Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview is Possible (2007). She is presently working on her autobiography.

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“Wow, what a great book. If more people could embrace this kind of thinking the world would be a much better place. In the tradition of my people one’s status in society in not based upon how much wealth one possesses and displays but rather it is based upon what one gives away. Thus according to our traditions the creators of this volume deserve special recognition as their work is a gift for the rest of us who have the privilege of reading it.”
—D. Memee Lavell-Harvard, President, Ontario Native Women’s Association and Vice President, Native Women’s Association of Canada

“Finally! This is the book we urgently need in these neoliberal, destructive, disoriented times. We all know that a profound change in our economy and culture is necessary, that we need to think in another way. But how? The authors of this collection of articles—all feminists, all peace workers, from the North and the South—demonstrate convincingly that “a radically different world view is possible” when we look at the world with Genevieve Vaughan’s radically different paradigm: gift giving instead of the coercive and compulsive exchange paradigm of the market economy.”
—Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, co-author of The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalized Economy and Women: The Last Colony