Three Masquerades: Essays on Equality, Work, and Human Rights

Marilyn Waring is a political scientist who served three terms (1975-84) in Parliament in New Zealand and then turned to farming. This book follows her If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics by about eight years. Waring's essays on POLITICS and HUMAN RIGHTS in Three Masquerades are absorbing, but what blew me away was her essay on WORK, which begins with Waring taking buckets of manure to friends for Christmas, because she has nothing else to give. It proceeds rapidly to a summary of her earlier work on the UN System of National Accounts and the policy implications of its "production boundaries" (alone worth the price of the book), goes on to describe attempts by international labor and other organizations to expand the ways in which value is assigned to work, and finally (the unmasking) comes up against old-fashioned impermeable barriers of hypocricy and sexism. Three Masquerades includes four useful appendices: three international covenants concerning human rights, and an appendix on the structure of the United Nations.