According to a 50-year-old Chinese saying 'women hold up half the sky'. Today women make up more than half of the world's population. References to the Chinese saying can be found, for example, in the publication by Nicholas Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn entitled Half the sky: Turning oppression into -opportunity for women worldwide (2009), who declared the global struggle for women's equality 'the paramount moral challenge' of our era. It is obvious that although the issues of gender equality have been addressed in many documents (including international law documents), girls and women all over the world still suffer from violence, discrimination and limited access to education. Their situation varies depending on world regions, but it seems that there is no country that could be a model example of absolute and actual equality of women and men. Agnieszka Gromkowska-Melosik (2011, p. 11) writes that in contemporary society, analysis of the situation of women should focus on equality rather than inequality as it is the equality that is shaping women's everyday life, their social experience and identity more and more often. However, issues raised in this work concern various geographical regions and contexts, thus the notion of heterogenity of female sub-population, for example living conditions, as well as the social and cultural capital of women, is becoming more noticeable.

Therefore, we would like to present our readers with a work that addresses the issue of recognition and resolution of problems of women all over the world, regardless of their race, nationality, culture or geographical region. The issues discussed in the work concern cultural aspects, various activities of women, roles of women in various cultures, both today and in the past. Issues related to social and cultural masculinity and femininity models constitute a part of the recent heated social discourse in Poland concerning the gender problem.

This paper groups the above mentioned issues in three sections entitled: Women in various cultures - change of roles over time and space (section 1), Women in public and domestic spheres (section 2) and Women and violence. Legal, social and cultural contexts (section 3). Each section contains ten articles.

The first part deals with the issue of women in various cultures, focusing the reader's attention on changing roles of women over time and space. In Western societies, women seem to enjoy increasing equality, which could be an optimistic conclusion drawn from the analysis of the beginning of the 21st century (Gromkowska-Melosik 2011, p. 11). How can we evaluate the dynamics of changes of women's roles, transformations in contemporary world and various cultures? Readers can try to answer this question after reading the articles by Elżbieta Dubas, Sylwia Skuza, Nadia Lutsan, Małgorzata Matlak, Kazimierz Mazurek, Margret Winzer, as well as Bashkim Rrahmani and Majlinda Belegu. Two articles - one by Katarzyna Pabis-Cisowska and one by Elżbieta Mach are devoted to roles of women from ethnic minorities. The first part also contains discussions on broadening the perspective on the view of the role of women in various cultures, focused on the results of research carried out among teachers (Ewa Pająk-Ważna) and the theory formulated by Simon Kuznets (article by Onur Tutulmaz and Peter Victor).

The second part is devoted to the issue of women in public and domestic spheres. Cultural models that regulate relations between women and men, as well as visions of roles to be played by women in public and private life affect e.g. individual life choices and structure of relations in various interpersonal contexts. Texts by: Katarzyna Dormus, Dominika U. Popielec, Agnieszka Świątek and Paweł Łubiński concern mainly civil and political activity of women, as well as changes in those areas taking into consideration historic contexts. There are also texts focusing on the issue of social activity of the specific sub-population of women, i.e. teachers (text by Justyna Miko-Giedyk), students (article by Adrian Biela and Ewa Sierankiewicz-Miernik), as well as female members of one of local communities, whose consumer behavior is the subject of analyses by three authors (Grzegorz Libor, Dorota Nowalska-Kapuścik and Monika Szpoczek-Sało).

While presenting the issues discussed in this section of the paper, it is worth to quote A. Giddens (Giddens 2001, p. 294), who wrote that 'by freeing themselves from home and family setting, women encountered a closed social environment'. In this way, contemporary women gained the opportunity to create new identities, although the conditions for pursuing specific life models are still unspecified and uncertain. Two authors of the texts in section two raised the issue of identity, referring to individual identity (Joanna Łukasik) and regional identity (Halina Rusek). Various faces of women are presented in the article by Monika Sulik, who used biographic approach to discuss the research, didactic and autobiographical perspective.

The third part of this paper presents women in situation of violence in legal, social and cultural context. Violence against women is a serious social issue in European countries and, in many parts of the world, a part of local culture and traditions. According to the report published by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA 2014), one third of European women were affected by violence and

This section of the work reflects on various aspects of women experiencing violence (mainly as victims), but the readers also have the opportunity to read the text about female perpetrators of violence. Issues raised by authors concern the process of raising awareness of rights in victims of violence, show both the statistical image of the problem and a case study. Problems discussed by the authors (Zofia Szarota, Fernando Barragán Medero, Ka-tarzyna Gajek, Małgorzata Halicka, Anna Szafranek, Jolanta Maćkowicz, Dorota Kamińska-Jones, Muhammad Mumtaz and Muhammad Shahbaz Arif, Malwina Misiąg, Antonio Llorens de la Cruz and Justyna Kusztal) are present in various corners of the world: India, Pakistan, Spanish Tenerife and Poland.

 

The editors of this volume would like to thank all the Authors, who contributed to this work. We would also like to thank the supervisors: professor Elżbieta Górnikowska-Zwolak from The Cardinal August Hlond University of Education in Myslowice and professor Pella Calogiannakis from the University of Crete in Rethymnon for her valuable comments and suggestions, which helped us make necessary corrections and give this work its final form.

 

Editors,

Jolanta Maćkowicz and Ewa Pająk-Ważna

Kraków, June 2014