WOMEN IN INNER CITIES

The paper tackles the issue of women in the inner cities of the U.K., particularly in England. 'Women' is a comprehensive term since it is known that the population of inner cities has a heterogeneous composition as far as cultures, races, languages, interests are concerned. The category of 'women' includes, in this case, both white and non-white women; each group is characterized by obvious ethnic diversity. Sometimes the distinction black versus white is sufficient for some of the arguments of this paper; in other cases 'black' is subdivided into Asian and Afro-Caribbean. However, there is no assumption here that all Asian and Afro-Caribbean women live in inner cities, but many do and whenever 'Asian' and 'Afro-Caribbean' are used, reference is made to those who live in the inner cities of the U.K. As stated above, 'women' includes both white and black women and the focus is on their common struggle against what Westwood (1989:175) calls 'exploitation under patriarchal capitalism'.